He took the little bottle from the table, and hung it mouth downwards in the sling. He took off his coat and waistcoat, mechanically winding up his watch and placing it on the mantel. "This is not at all what I had hoped. It is _most_ unsatisfactory, quite commonplace, in fact," he said as he lay down on the bed. He felt a little splash on his cheek, and moved his face out of the direct course of the liquid, which now began to fall more rapidly. CHAPTER IX. _TWENTY YEARS AFTER. AN EPILOGUE IN TWO PICTURES._ THE FIRST PICTURE. _The Art of Religion._ The church was very full. It was the vigil of All Saints, and Father Scott was to preach. Far away, the culminating point of the long vista of shadowy arches, stood the High Altar, blazing with lights. The choir had just taken their stalls, and every head was bent low. An orchestra was reinforcing the organ, and the long silver trumpets, loved of old Purcell, shouted jubilantly, echoing away down the dim clerestory. Father Scott felt a strange thrill, an uplifting of the heart, at the melody. He stood up in his stall with the rest, a man whose face still showed a trend to the commonplace, but sweetened, almost refined away by something else. The little sisters of St. Cecily, sweet souls with whom he worked, said among themselves that he had had a dear friend once whom he had loved, and for whom he still mourned and prayed, and that it was this that made him such an eminently lovable man. Indeed, Sister Eliza had even read a novel he had written in his early days, a mystic romance of a glorious youth who had never come to prime. The music of the stately anthem swelled up in a burst of praise, the trumpets singing high over all with keen vibratory notes that told of an inner mystery to ears initiate. Then, when Father Gray, an old priest whose days were nearly done, read the lesson, Scott leant back with crossed hands, thinking of old times, of his youth. It seemed to him on this great night of the Church that other and less earthly forms and voices thronged the building. In the Creed, the words "communion of saints" touched him strangely, as they always did; but to-night they came home to him with a deeper meaning. "God is so good," he thought simply. "Surely He has pardoned him for that one sin. He was so pure and beautiful--very pleasant hast thou been to me." His thoughts wandered disconnectedly, recalling sentences that had struck him, old scenes and scraps of verse. The smell of the incense brought back Cowley or the Sunday evening services at St. Barnabas. He rejoiced in his heart at the stateliness and circumstance of worship around him, and he recalled some old articles in the _Church Chimes_, defending eloquently the "true ritual of holy Church." He had thought them so good, he remembered, such a dignified answer to the other side.