XII. A Soul alone on the Sea-Shore 262 BOOK III. I. What it Meant to the World's Women 271 II. Cyril Hands Redux 283 III. All ye Inhabitants of the World, and Dwellers on the Earth, See ye, when He Lifteth up an Ensign on the Mountains--Is. xviii: 3 289 IV. A Luncheon Party 302 V. By the Tower of Hippicus 322 VI. Under the Eastern Stars: towards Gerizim 342 VII. The Last Meeting 356 VIII. Death Coming with One Grace 364 IX. At Walktown Again 376 Epilogue 385 BOOK I "The mystery of iniquity doth already work." WHEN IT WAS DARK CHAPTER I AN INCIDENT BY WAY OF PROLOGUE Mr. Hinchcliffe, the sexton, looked up as Mr. Philemon, the clerk, unlocked the great gates of open ironwork which led into the street. Hinchcliffe was cutting the lettering on a tombstone, supported by heavy wooden trestles, under a little shed close to the vestry door of the church. The clerk, a small, rotund man, clerical in aspect, and wearing a round felt hat, pulled out a large, old-fashioned watch. "Time for the bell, William," he said. The parish church was a large building in sham perpendicular. It stood in a very central position on the Manchester main road, rising amid a bare triangle of flat gravestones, and separated from the street pavement only by high iron railings. It was about half-past four on a dull autumn afternoon. The trams swung ringing down the black, muddy road, and the long procession of great two-wheeled carts, painted vermilion, carried coal from the collieries six miles away to the great mills and factories of Salford. The two men went into the church, and soon the tolling of a deep-voiced bell, high up in the pall of smoke which lay over the houses, beat out in regular and melancholy sound. Inside the building the noise of the traffic sank into a long, unceasing note like the _bourdon_ note of a distant organ. Hinchcliffe tolled the bell in the dim, ugly vestibule with his foot in a loop in the rope, sitting on the chest which held the dozen loaves which were given away every Sunday to the old women in the free seats. The clerk opened the green baize swing-doors and strode up the aisle towards the vestry, waking mournful echoes as the nails in his boots struck the tiled floor. Saint Thomas's Church, the mother church of Walktown, was probably the ugliest church in Lancashire. The heavy galleries, the drab walls, the terrible gloom of the vast structure, all spoke eloquently of a chilly, dour Christianity, a grudging and suspicious Sunday religion which animated its congregation.