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order at the wedding except for an abrupt end to the wedding march on a triumphal high note. Miss Ardythe, who had attacked the organ regularly since a defrauding of her maidenhood at the turn of the century, had dropped stone dead at the keyboard with her sharp chin on a high D. Then there was also Aunt May’s disapproval of Camilla’s father, the Town Carpenter, who was said to have Indian blood, and had a riotous time at the wedding. Aunt May preferred to exclude him from her scheme, since he had been baptized in Christian reason and his salvation was his own affair, unlike a harried group of Laplanders who were even then being pursued by representatives of one of the Societies through which she extended her Good works. Those heathen were a safe distance away, not likely to be found rolling down Summer Street at unseemly hours, singing unchristian songs.
    Camilla had borne Gwyon a son and gone, virginal, to earth: virginal in the sight of man, at any rate. The white funeral carriage of San Zwingli was ordained for infants and maidens. For the tainted and corrupt there was a ponderous black vehicle which Gwyon had turned his back on the moment he saw it. —She would never ride in that, he murmured in English, speaking not to San Zwingli’s priest who stood beside him, but as though to someone inside himself. And before they closed that casket for the last time, Gwyon had stopped them, to reach in and remove Camilla’s earrings, heavy Byzantine hoops of gold which had contrasted the fine bones of her face all these last years of her life. In the first week of his marriage, a friend, an archaeologist whom he had not seen since, had shown them to Camilla, and noting the delicate pricks in her ears (done with needle and cork years before), said laughing, —You may have them if you can wear them . . . , not knowing Camilla, not knowing she would run from the room clutching the gold hoops, and surprised (though Gwyon was not) when she burst in again with wild luster in her eyes, wearing the gold earrings, blood all over them.
    Now, with a few delicate lies and promise of a carboy of holy water from a notorious northern font, he secured the white carriage to bear her up the hill, renovated like that remontant goddesswho annually clambered forth from the pool with her virginity renewed. In that perennial innocence, —If there had only been time . . . He could hear her voice in this wistful complaint all of her life. —If only there were time . . . , she would have asked him for instructions. —What shall
I
do, in a Purgatory? . . . where they all speak Spanish? I’ve never been in any kind of Purgatory before, and no one . . . I’m not afraid, you know I’m not afraid but . . . if you’ll only tell me what I should do . . .
    Gwyon struck vaguely at the woman’s profile on the stone shield of Don Felipe V, who stood above him casting back from the concave surface of a noseless face the motionless cold fallen from the white peaks of the. Sierra de Guadarrama to the north, down upon the city. —El aire de Madrid es tan sutil, que mata a un hombre y no apaga a un candil, he had read somewhere, and that deadly cold seemed to come not from outside but to diffuse itself through his body from the marrow in his bones. False dawn past, the sun prepared the sky for its appearance, and there, a shred of perfection abandoned unsuspecting at the earth’s rim, lay the curve of the old moon, before the blaze which would rise behind it to extinguish the cold quiet of its reign.
    A feeling of liberation came over Reverend Gwyon. Whether it was release from something, or into something, he could not tell. He felt that a decision had been made somewhere beyond his own consciousness: that he must follow its bent now, and discover its import later. There would be time.
    There would be time: just as the sun sped up over the margin of the earth in the miracle of its appearance and then, assured in its