lain thick on the road, but in here there was a coolness as of death and the austere presence of God. Finch had never been alone in the church at night before, and he felt the Presence there in the moonlight as he never felt it when people sat in the pews and Mr. Fennel moved about in the chancel.
Finch's belief in God seemed to be something that would not die. In spite of the boyish blasphemies of his schoolmates, or the half-amused tolerance of young men like Arthur Leigh, or the cynical references to Christ as a curiosity which he had heard among the staff in the publishing house, his belief in Him remained secure, terrible, and strangely sweet, somewhere deep within him. Music had freed him from the terror of God that had troubled his boyhood, but there in the church he felt in his very fibre the power of the Almighty Presence.
On that first night he played little. He sat with his long hands on the keys, searching his heart, trying to find out, if he could, what was in it of good and evil. Now its depths seemed less turgid than usual. He looked into it and saw a white light glimmering. God living in him. Not to be beaten down. The white light, pointed like a flame, quivered, drew upward. Sank, writhed as though in agony. He brooded over his heart, trying to discover its secret.
Had this white flame anything to do with the pale shape that sometimes, in moments of exaltation, emerged from his breast and floated for a space, face down, close beside him, before it was dissolved into the darkness? That pale shape he knew was himself, his innermost essence, drawn from his body by some magnetic force. Did the shape—himself—emerge from the body in search of something without which it would never rest? If the white flame he saw in his heart was God in him, was this white shape perhaps himself in God?
In this dark tangle of thought one thing was clear to him. He was being searched for, as he was searching. Not by God, whose eye already held him; not by Christ, who had one awful night shown him His pierced hands;
