“I’ll keep you,” Priam Farll was going to say, as he descended, but he thought it would be more final to dismiss the machine; so he dismissed it.

He rang the bell with frantic haste, lest he should run away ere he had rung it.  And then his heart went thumping, and the perspiration damped the lovely lining of his new hat; and his legs trembled, literally!

He was in hell on the Dean’s doorstep.

The door was opened by a man in livery of prelatical black, who eyed him inimically.

“Er——­” stammered Priam Farll, utterly flustered and craven.  “Is this Mr. Parker’s?”

Now Parker was not the Dean’s name, and Priam knew that it was not.  Parker was merely the first name that had come into Priam’s cowardly head.

“No, it isn’t,” said the flunkey with censorious lips.  “It’s the Dean’s.”

“Oh, I beg pardon,” said Priam Farll.  “I thought it was Mr. Parker’s.”

And he departed.

Between the ringing of the bell and the flunkey’s appearance, he had clearly seen what he was capable, and what he was incapable, of doing.  And the correction of England’s error was among his incapacities.  He could not face the Dean.  He could not face any one.  He was a poltroon in all these things; a poltroon.  No use arguing!  He could not do it.

“I thought it was Mr. Parker’s!” Good heavens!  To what depths can a great artist fall.

That evening he received a cold letter from Duncan Farll, with a nave-ticket for the funeral.  Duncan Farll did not venture to be sure that Mr. Henry Leek would think proper to attend his master’s interment; but he enclosed a ticket.  He also stated that the pound a week would be paid to him in due course.  Lastly he stated that several newspaper representatives had demanded Mr. Henry Leek’s address, but he had not thought fit to gratify this curiosity.

Priam was glad of that.

“Well, I’m dashed!” he reflected, handling the ticket for the nave.

There it was, large, glossy, real as life.

In the Valhalla

In the vast nave there were relatively few people—­that is to say, a few hundred, who had sufficient room to move easily to and fro under the eyes of officials.  Priam Farll had been admitted through the cloisters, according to the direction printed on the ticket.  In his nervous fancy, he imagined that everybody must be gazing at him suspiciously, but the fact was that he occupied the attention of no one at all.  He was with the unprivileged, on the wrong side of the massive screen which separated the nave from the packed choir and transepts, and the unprivileged are never interested in themselves; it is the privileged who interest them.  The organ was wafting a melody of Purcell to the furthest limits of the Abbey.  Round a roped space a few ecclesiastical uniforms kept watch over the ground that would be the tomb.  The sunlight of noon beat and quivered in long lances