Suddenly the room was blazing with light. The Torchlight Procession tumbled into the Precincts. The Cathedral sprang into light; on all the hills the bonfires were blazing. Black figures scattered like dwarfs, pigmies, giants about the grass. The torches tossed and whirled and danced. The Cathedral rose from the darkness, triumphant in gold and fire. Book IV The Last Stand Chapter I In Ronder's House: Ronder, Wistons Every one has, at one time or another, known the experience of watching some friend or acquaintance moved suddenly from the ordinary atmosphere of every day into some dramatic region of crisis where he becomes, for a moment, far more than life-size in his struggle against the elements; he is lifted, like Siegmund in _The Valkyrie_, into the clouds for his last and most desperate duel. There was something of this feeling in the attitude taken in our town after the Jubilee towards Archdeacon Brandon. As Miss Stiles said (not meaning it at all unkindly), it really was very fortunate for everybody that the town had the excitement of the Pybus appointment to follow immediately the Jubilee drama; had it not been so, how flat would every one have been! And by the Pybus appointment she meant, of course, the Decline and Fall of Archdeacon Brandon, and the issue of his contest with delightful, clever Canon Ronder. The disappearance of Mrs. Brandon and Mr. Morris would have been excitement enough quite by itself for any one year. As every one said, the wives of Archdeacons simply did _not_ run away with the clergymen of their town. It was not done. It had never, within any one's living memory, been done before, whether in Polchester or anywhere else. Clergymen were, of course, only human like any one else, and so were their wives, but at least they did not make a public declaration of their failings; they remembered their positions, who they were and what they were. In one sense there had been no public declaration. Mrs. Brandon had gone up to London to see about some business, and Mr. Morris also happened to be away, and his sister-in-law was living on in the Rectory exactly as though nothing had occurred. However, that disguise could not hold for long, and every one knew exactly what had happened--well, if not exactly, every one had a very good individual version of the whole story.