“Accident!” he muttered to himself. “Pure accident!” he repeated, as they crossed in front of the altar and made their way to the lady-chapel behind it. And he even felt, as he fumbled about in the dim light, looking for some sign of the Saxon king’s coffin, a sense of having feloniously stolen his ecstasy from some treasure-house of the human race! “Why should I,” he thought, “be singled out by pure chance for this? That Waterloo-steps face⁠—no King Aethelwolf for him, no fan-tracery, no scent of pinks⁠—Is my gratitude to the gods, then, a base and scurvy feeling?”

Even as this thought crossed his mind he stumbled against some sort of glass framework upon the southern floor of that lady-chapel.

“Here we are, Miss Gault!” he whispered excitedly. “Only, I suppose we shall get into trouble if that organist hears us. Look here, though, for God’s sake! This is the king’s coffin!”