, a vision of how it might indeed
add to the zest of active rites. All this was a good deal to have been denoted
by a mere lurking figure who was nothing to him; but, the last thing before
leaving the church, he had the surprise of a still deeper quickening.
    He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the museum
mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to reconstitute a past,
to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of Victor Hugo, whom, a few days
before, giving the rein for once in a way to the joy of life, he had purchased
in seventy bound volumes, a miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by
the shopman, at the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while
he played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in
reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the question of
where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge would be able to enter.
Were seventy volumes in red-and-gold to be perhaps what he should most
substantially have to show at Woollett as the fruit of his mission? It was a
possibility that held him a minute - held him till he happened to feel that some
one, unnoticed, had approached him and paused. Turning, he saw that a lady stood
there as for a greeting, and he sprang up as he next took her, securely, for
Madame de Vionnet, who appeared to have recognised him as she passed near him on
her way to the door. She checked, quickly and gaily, a certain confusion in him,
came to meet it, turned it back, by an art of her own; the confusion having
threatened him as he knew her for the person he had lately been observing. She
was the lurking figure of the dim chapel; she had occupied him more than she
guessed; but it came to him in time, luckily, that he needn't tell her and that
no harm, after all, had been done. She herself, for that matter, straightway
showing she felt their encounter as the happiest of accidents, had for him a
»You come here too?« that despoiled surprise of every awkwardness.
    »I come often,« she said. »I love this place, but I'm terrible, in general,
for churches. The old women who live in them all know me; in fact I'm already
myself one of the old women. It's