There were groups of thieves and harlots squatted on the pavement about the bases of the great columns, and drinking and quarrelling as they sat. Cheats, gulls, copper-captains, flaunting women and swaggering gallants; the hungry and the homeless; the fugitive and the spy; the clerical parasite and the convicted bankrupt, gathered and mingled here, whether for sanctuary or profit, and made of the Temple one vast house of abomination. Nor might the Queen herself, acting Heaven’s vicegerent, scourge the evil forth; for in spite of all her severe edicts for cleansing the place, the swarm would perpetually regather, like flies disturbed from carrion, the moment the interruption was past. Brion, though willing to be an unimpassioned philosopher, found himself regarding the scene with a regret that the cleansing had not come in a wholesale holocaust, when fire--here also--had, not so many years before, consumed the lofty wooden spire and threatened the whole building with destruction. It had been struck by lightning during a great storm, and it seemed strange that the judgment of God should have withheld itself something short of its complete execution. But, perhaps, unlike Sodom, there had been found sufficient good men among its Chapter to qualify, for the time being, the Divine chastisement. The two had soon enough of watching the throng, and of listening to its dull reverberating clamour. The sound, made up of countless volubility and the tramp of innumerable feet, all rising into inarticulate echoes, was like a roar of surf levelled by distance, or the drone of bees in a gigantic hive. It thudded on the brain, producing after a time a feeling of mental numbness, so that Brion was glad to escape into the open, and to draw in air uncontaminated by the foul breath of sacrilege. He had had enough of St Paul’s, and did not want to go there again. But that was only one disillusionment in a world of exciting novelties. One day they went to see the house in Chancellor’s Lane where the great Cardinal had lived in the Queen’s father’s time; and, being so near, paid a visit to Gray’s Inn, where Clerivault pointed out to Brion his Uncle’s former residence. And the boy looked on the place in silence, a strange emotion at his heart; for were not those rooms known to his mother too, since it was thence the little Book of Hours had been dated? He had never once spoken to Clerivault on that subject, though he was well enough aware that for that faithful soul, being in his master’s confidence, it held no secrets. But he could not bring his mind to discuss with any one, however sympathetic, a tragedy so intimate and so sacred.