“I can’t bear it:  I can’t, I can’t!” she cried.

Trivett looked pitifully distressed for a few moments before saying: 

“Would you like me to play?”

Mavis nodded.

“I don’t know if the church is open; but, if it is, they’ve been decorating it for—­for—­Would you very much mind?”

“Play to me:  play to me!” cried Mavis.

The musician, whose whole appearance was eloquent of the soil, clumped across the gravelled path of the churchyard, followed by Mavis.  He tried many doors, all of which were locked, till he came to a small door in the tower; this was unfastened.

He admitted Mavis, and then struck a wax match to enable her to see.  The cold smell of the church at once took her mind back to when she had entered it as a happy, careless child.  With heart filled with dumb despair, she sat in the first seat she came to.  As she waited, the gloom was slowly dissipated, to reveal the familiar outlines of the church.  At the same time, her nostrils were assailed by the pervading and exotic smell of hot-house blooms.

The noise made by the opening of the organ shutters cracked above her head and reverberated through the building.  While she waited, none of the sacred associations of the church spoke to her heart; her soul was bruised with pain, rendering her incapable of being moved by the ordinary suggestions of the place.  Then Trivett played.  Mavis’s highly-strung, distraught mind ever, when sick as now, seeking the way of health, listened intently, devoutly, to the message of the music.  Sorrow was the musician’s theme:  not individual grief, but the travail of an aged world.  There had been, there was, such an immense accumulation of anguish that, by comparison with the sum of this, her own griefs now seemed infinitesimal.  Then the organ became eloquent of the majesty of sorrow.  It was of no dumb, almost grateful, resignation to the will of a Heavenly Father, who imposed suffering upon His erring children for their ultimate good, of which it spoke.  Rather was the instrument eloquent of the power wielded by a pagan god of pain, before whose throne was a vast aggregation of torment, to which every human thing, and particularly loving women, were, by the conditions consequent on their nature, condemned to contribute.  In return for this inevitable sacrifice, the god of pain bestowed a dignity of mind and bearing upon his votaries, which set them apart, as though they were remote from the thoughtless ruck.

While Trivett played, Mavis was eased of some of her pain, her mind being ever receptive to any message that music might offer.  When the organ stopped, the cold outlines of the church chilled her to the marrow.  The snap occasioned by the shutting up of the instrument seemed a signal on the part of some invisible inquisitor that her torments were to recommence.  Before Trivett joined her, the sound of the church clock striking the hour smote her ear with its vibrant,