The sensation of having the mysterious girl at his elbow in that wonder-striking interior was magnificent.

He murmured, with pride: 

“Do you know this place has the widest nave of any cathedral in the world?  It’s a much bigger cathedral than St. Paul’s.  In fact I’m not sure if it isn’t the biggest in England.”

“You know,” he said again, “in the whole of the nineteenth century only one cathedral was built in England.”

“Which was that?”

“Truro....  And you could put Truro inside this and leave a margin all round.  Mr. Enwright says this is the last cathedral that ever will be built, outside America.”

They gazed, more and more aware of a solemn miracle.

“It’s marvellous—­marvellous!” he breathed.

After a few moments, glancing at her, a strong impulse to be confidential mastered him.  He was obliged to tell that girl.

“I say, we’ve lost that competition—­for the Law Courts.”

He smiled, but the smile had no effect.

“Oh!” She positively started.

He saw that her eyes had moistened, and he looked quickly away, as though he had seen something that he ought not to have seen.  She cared!  She cared a great deal!  She was shocked by the misfortune to the firm, by the injustice to transcendent merit!  She knew nothing whatever about any design in the competition.  But it was her religion that the Lucas & Enwright design was the best, and by far the best.  He had implanted the dogma, and he felt that she was ready to die for it.  Mystery dropped away from her.  Her soul stood bare to him.  He was so happy and so proud that the intensity of his feeling dismayed him.  But he was enheartened too, and courage to surmount a thousand failures welled up in him as from an unimagined spring.

“I wonder who that is?” she said quietly and ordinarily, as if a terrific event had not happened.

On the highest floor, at the other extremity of the cathedral, in front of the apse, a figure had appeared in a frock-coat and a silk hat.  The figure stood solitary, gazing around in the dying light.

“By Jove!  It’s Bentley!  It’s the architect!”

George literally trembled.  He literally gave a sob.  The vision of Bentley within his masterpiece, of Bentley whom Enwright himself worshipped, was too much for him.  Renewed ambition rushed through him in electric currents.  All was not wrong with the world of architecture.  Bentley had succeeded.  Bentley, beginning life as an artisan, had succeeded supremely.  And here he stood on the throne of his triumph.  Genius would not be denied.  Beauty would conquer despite everything.  What completed the unbearable grandeur of the scene was that Bentley had cancer of the tongue, and was sentenced to death.  Bentley’s friends knew it; the world of architecture knew it; Bentley knew it....  “Shall I tell her?” George thought.  He looked at her; he looked at the vessel which he had filled with emotion.  He could not speak.  A highly sensitive decency, an abhorrence of crudity, restrained him.  “No,” he decided, “I can’t tell her now.  I’ll tell her some other time.”