He turned the pages of the book, sadly and slowly, carefully moving the grey heron’s-feather to the middle of the “Religio,” where it would not be disturbed.

When he came to one of those majestic, far-echoing passages⁠—passages that had always struck him as superior, after their fashion, to anything else in literature, except certain single lines in Milton⁠—he set himself to intone the familiar cadences in a low, monotonous singsong.

He dared not give more than a furtive glance now and then at the delicate profile beside him; but his impression was⁠—whether a true or a false one he could not be sure⁠—that Christie was not unaffected by those plangent, cosmogonic litanies.