"Dear, dear father. I love you so. I love you so. No one shall hurt you.
Father dear, father darling."
Suddenly the room was blazing with light. The Torchlight Procession
tumbled into the Precincts. The Cathedral sprang into light; on all the
hills the bonfires were blazing.
Black figures scattered like dwarfs, pigmies, giants about the grass. The
torches tossed and whirled and danced.
The Cathedral rose from the darkness, triumphant in gold and fire.
Book IV
The Last Stand
Chapter I
In Ronder's House: Ronder, Wistons
Every one has, at one time or another, known the experience of watching
some friend or acquaintance moved suddenly from the ordinary atmosphere of
every day into some dramatic region of crisis where he becomes, for a
moment, far more than life-size in his struggle against the elements; he
is lifted, like Siegmund in _The Valkyrie_, into the clouds for his
last and most desperate duel.
There was something of this feeling in the attitude taken in our town
after the Jubilee towards Archdeacon Brandon. As Miss Stiles said (not
meaning it at all unkindly), it really was very fortunate for everybody
that the town had the excitement of the Pybus appointment to follow
immediately the Jubilee drama; had it not been so, how flat would every
one have been! And by the Pybus appointment she meant, of course, the
Decline and Fall of Archdeacon Brandon, and the issue of his contest with
delightful, clever Canon Ronder.
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