This last remark, coming at the moment when the Abbey clock above their heads struck four, produced considerable bewilderment in Wolf’s mind. The idea of his estranged parents having been “in love” with each other made him feel curiously in the cold, and strangely alien to both of them. In some obscure way he felt as if Selena Gault were practising an indecent treachery, but a treachery so subtle that he couldn’t lay his finger upon it!

“Let’s go in here for a minute!” he said. “And then I must keep my appointment with Mr. Otter.”

They entered the great nave of the Abbey-church and sat down. The high, cool, vaulted roof, with its famous fan-tracery, seemed to offer itself to his mind as if it were some “branch-charmèd” vista of verdurous silence, along which his spirit might drift and float at large, a leaf among leaves!