Stopping an instant at the next sculptural wonder in his way—­the elaborately designed tomb of Cardinal Amboise, concerning the eternal fate of which “brother in Christ” the good Felix had no scruples or fears whatever, he stepped softly down from the choir-chapel where he had been wandering to and fro for some time in solitary musings, and went towards the great central nave.  It was quite empty,—­not even a weary silk-weaver, escaped from one of the ever-working looms of the city, had crept in to tell her beads.  Broad, vacant, vast, and suggestive of a sublime desolation, the grand length and width of the Latin Cross which shapes the holy precincts, stretched into vague distance, one or two lamps were burning dimly at little shrines set in misty dark recesses,—­a few votive candles, some lit, some smouldered out, leaned against each other crookedly in their ricketty brass stand, fronting a battered statue of the Virgin.  The Angelus had ceased ringing some ten minutes since,—­and now one solemn bell, swinging high up in the Cathedral towers, tolled forth the hour of six, slowly and with a strong pulsating sound which seemed to shake the building down to its very vaults and deep foundations.  As the last stroke shivered and thundered through the air, a strain of music, commencing softly, then swelling into fuller melody, came floating from aloft, following the great bell’s vibration.  Half way down the nave, just as he was advancing slowly towards the door of egress, this music overtook the Cardinal like an arresting angel, bringing him to a sudden pause.

“The organist practises late,” he said aloud, as though speaking to some invisible companion, and then was silent, listening.  Round him and above him surged the flood of rich and dulcet harmony,—­the sunset light through the blue and red stained-glass windows grew paler and paler—­the towering arches which sprang, as it were, from slender stem-like side-columns up to full-flowering boughs of Gothic ornamentation, crossing and re-crossing above the great High Altar, melted into a black dimness,—­and then—­all at once, without any apparent cause, a strange, vague suggestion of something supernatural and unseen began suddenly to oppress the mind of the venerable prelate with a curious sense of mingled awe and fear.  Trembling a little, he knew not why, he softly drew a chair from one of the shadowy corners, where all such seats were piled away out of sight so that they might not disfigure the broad and open beauty of the nave, and, sitting down, he covered his eyes with one hand and strove to rouse himself from the odd, half-fainting sensation which possessed him.  How glorious now was the music that poured like a torrent from the hidden organ-loft!  How full of searching and potential proclamation!—­the proclamation of an eternal, unguessed mystery, for which no merely human speech might ever find fit utterance!  Some divine declaration of God’s absolute omnipresence,—­ or of Heaven’s sure nearness,—­touched