The Inquisitor by Hugh Walpole — Read

On the afternoon of October 11th at 2.30 they held in the Cathedral the annual festival of St. Clare. This was a service attended by the children of all the girls' schools in Glebeshire. The girls filled the nave, and their white dresses, seen from the steps of the altar by the Bishop as he pronounced the Blessing, made the church brilliant as though with freshly fallen snow. The October sun, slanting through the great rose window, lighted the Bishop's Tomb, the delicate lace-work of the stone screen, the shining black- marble recumbent figure; the green stone of the ring on the finger burned with a personal fiery glow. Kendon looked at the tomb: he looked far away to the hundreds upon hundreds of children. He had already preached to them from the pulpit in the nave. He was not feeling well to-day--nothing more than weakness, weariness, a general feebleness of head and limb.

But, as he looked down on those many upturned faces, thought of all that was in store for those children, how, even now, their minds were filled, not with what he was saying to them but rather with a dress, a friendship, a game, a schoolmistress, a social snobbery, he felt for them an infinite tenderness and compassion. His own time was now drawing so very short: they had so much to bear and suffer and endure, were advancing so lightheartedly forward. Behind him, to the left, was Henry Arden. All history was in that place. He felt now, as he had felt once before when, on a visit to California, he had looked through the great hundred-inch telescope at Mount Wilson and seen Saturn, ringed, a blazing globe of silver, so near, so lovely, so superb in its certain grandeur; and now this little earth, this strife and agony, this unawareness, this false sense of security. .