Brandon shut his study door and looked about him. The lamp on his table was lit, his study had a warm and pleasant air with the books gleaming in their shelves and the fire crackling. (You needed a fire on these late summer evenings.) Nevertheless, although the room looked comfortable, he did not at once move into it. He stood there beside the door, as though he was waiting for something. He listened. The house was intensely quiet. He opened the door and looked into the passage. There was no one there. The gas hissed ever so slightly, like a whispering importunate voice. He came back into his room, closing the door very carefully behind him, went across softly to his writing-table, sat down, and took up his pen. His eyes were fixed on the door, and then suddenly he would jerk round in his chair as though he expected to catch some one who was standing just behind him. Then began that fight that always now must be waged whenever he sat down at his desk, the fight to drive his thoughts, like sheep, into the only pen that they must occupy. He must think now only of one thing; there were others--pictures, ideas, memories, fears, horrors even--crowding, hovering close about him, and afterwards--after Pybus--he would attend to them. Only one thing mattered now. "Yes, you gibbering idiots, do your worst; knock me down. Come on four to one like the cowards that you are, strike me in the back, take my wife from me, and ruin my house. I will attend to all of you shortly, but first--Pybus." His lips were moving as he turned over the papers. _Was_ there some one in the room with him? His head was aching so badly that it was difficult to think. And his heart! How strangely that behaved in these days! Five heavy slow beats, then a little skip and jump, then almost as though it had stopped beating altogether. Another thing that made it difficult to work in that room was that the Cathedral seemed so close. It was not close really, although you could, so often, hear the organ, but now Brandon had the strange fancy that it had drawn closer during these last weeks, and was leaning forward with its ear to his house, listening just as a man might! Funny how Brandon now was always thinking of the Cathedral as a person! Stones and bricks and mortar and bits of glass, that's what the Cathedral was, and yet lately it had seemed to move and have a being of its own.