‘His walking-stick has grown!’ Joshua added. ‘It was a rough one—cut from the hedge, I remember.’
At every puff of wind the tree turned white, till they could not bear to look at it; and they walked away.
‘I see him every night,’ Cornelius murmured . . . ‘Ah, we read our Hebrews to little account, Jos! Υπέμεινε σταυρον, αισχυνης καταφρονησας. To have endured the cross, despising the shame—there lay greatness! But now I often feel that I should like to put an end to trouble here in this self-same spot.’
‘I have thought of it myself,’ said Joshua.
‘Perhaps we shall, some day,’ murmured his brother. ‘Perhaps,’ said Joshua moodily.
With that contingency to consider in the silence of their nights and days they bent their steps homewards.
December 1888.
ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT
CHAPTER I
The man who played the disturbing part in the two quiet lives hereafter depicted—no great man, in any sense, by the way—first had knowledge of them on an October evening, in the city of Melchester. He had been standing in the Close, vainly endeavouring to gain amid the darkness a glimpse of the most homogeneous pile of mediæval architecture in England, which towered and tapered from the damp and level sward in front of him. While he stood the presence of the Cathedral walls was revealed rather by the ear than by the eyes; he could not see them, but they reflected sharply a roar of sound which entered the Close by a street leading from the city square, and, falling upon the building, was flung back upon him.