The Lady Chapel was quite shut out from the choir, nave, and aisles. As Arthur stood there the whole of the auditory and performers were completely away from view. The altar-screen was between him and the gay _parterre_ of bonnets, hemmed in by the surrounding margin of baize and matting. Around him were decaying monuments, themselves needing memorials (as Crabbe puts it in “The Borough”); half-finished slabs fresh from the hands of the restorer, and other evidences of the struggle of the present to preserve the past. Subdued morning beams came in through tiers of lancet lights; and mounting up, echoing along the fretted roof of the nave, the strains of the chorus came streaming in upon him over the screen, filling the little chapel with exquisite harmonies which seemed to die away in mysterious vaults and corridors. In pianissimo passages of solo or chorus the music receded, and died away in the west, like faint memories of former strains. This was a memory worth cherishing; but it was fixed in the artist’s mind as much by the association of the previous day as it was by its own intrinsic sublimity. Six months afterwards it was that Arthur was introduced to Phœbe Tallant, and then that dear memory came back to him, softened into a kind of religious tint, as if it came through a painted window of the mind. “This girl is my destiny,” thought Arthur at once; for the face was always in his mind, and somehow it was mixed up with thoughts that were above the world, mixed up with dreamy pictures of cathedral aisles, and with memories of swelling anthems. For a time, after he knew Phœbe, Arthur feared he was drifting into morbid sensibility. He had led a sober, monkish kind of life for years, and with this new image in his mind he had at first given himself up to wanderings about the old cathedral, and a sort of fascinating unreal saint-worship which he carried out for a time on canvas; but as time wore on he grew out of these morbid habits and once more there was a healthy glow in his conversation and in his pictures. But he was desperately, madly in love, nevertheless. CHAPTER VII IS A SENTIMENTAL CHAPTER, CONTAINING A FEW MORAL REFLECTIONS BY THE WAY. Yes, Arthur Phillips was desperately in love. A silly thing that, now-a-days, is it not? Love! All very well in poetry and romance; all very well for school-girls and beardless boys. But may we not excuse an artist for fostering such a ridiculous passion? It is something in his line, you know. Painters, Senior Mammon will probably say, are ridiculous fellows at best. They spend their time in a fool’s paradise, studying the changes of the sky, making copies of trees and leaves, and lashing themselves into furious excitement about the glories of summer mornings and autumn sunsets.