emaciated features, and beautiful deep eyes.  Phthisical!—­like himself—­poor little wretch!  He found out that she was a waitress in a cheap eating-house, and had very long hours.  “Jolly good pay, though, compared to what it used to be!  Why, with tips, on a good day, I can make seven and eight shillings.  That’s good, ain’t it?  And now the war’s goin’ to stop.  Do you think I want it to stop?  I don’t think!  Me and my sister’ll be starvin’ again, I suppose?”

He found out she was an orphan, living with her sister, who was a typist, in Kentish town.  But she refused to tell him her address, which he idly asked her.  “What did you want with it?” she said, with a sudden frown.  “I’m straight, I am.  There’s my bus!  Night! night!—­So long!” And with a half-sarcastic wave of her tiny hand, she left him, and was soon engulfed in the swirl round a north-bound bus.

He wandered on along Regent Street, and Waterloo Place, down the Duke of York’s steps into the Mall, where some captured guns were already in position, with children swarming about them; and so through St. James’s Park to the Abbey.  The fog was now all but clear, and there were frosty stars overhead.  The Abbey towers rose out of a purple haze, etherially pale and moon-touched.  The House of Commons was sitting, but there was still no light on the Clock Tower, and no unmuffling of the lamps.  London was waiting, as the world was waiting, for the next step in the vast drama which had three continents for its setting; and meanwhile, save for the added movements in the streets, and a new something in the faces of the crowds hurrying along the pavements, there was nothing to show that all was in fact over, and the war won.

Delane followed a stream of people entering the Abbey through the north transept.  He was carried on by them, till a verger showed him into a seat near the choir, and he mechanically obeyed, and dropped on his knees.

When he rose from them, the choir was filing in, and the vergers with their pokers were escorting the officiating Canon to his seat.  Delane had not been inside a church for two or three years, and it was a good deal more since he had stood last in Westminster Abbey.  But as he watched the once familiar spectacle there flowed back upon him, with startling force, old impressions and traditions.  He was in Cambridge again, a King’s man, attending King’s Chapel.  He was thinking of his approaching Schools, and there rose in his mind a number of figures, moving or at rest, Cambridge men like himself, long since dismissed from recollection.  Suddenly memory seemed to open out—­to become full, and urgent, and emphatic.  He appeared to be living at a great rate, to be thinking and feeling with peculiar force.  Perhaps it was fever.  His hands burnt.

“My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour!”

As the chant rose, and he recognized the words, he felt extraordinarily exalted, released, purified.  Why not think away the past?  It has no existence, except in thought.