"
[Illustration: DIVERS DIVERSIONS.]
I peered through the crowds at this, right and left, with
inexpressible emotion. Perhaps this accidental sort of quest was that
which destiny had arranged for the solution of my life-problem. To
light upon Mary Ashburleigh in these festal throngs, perhaps wanting
assistance, perhaps calling upon my name even now through her velvet
lips, was a chance the mere notion of which made my blood leap.
When Brussels gives herself over to holiday-making, she does it in
a whole-souled and self-consistent way that has plenty of
attractiveness. The houses seemed to have turned themselves inside
out to replenish the streets. People in their best clothes, equipages,
processions, bands, troops of children, filled the avenues. Some
conjecture that there might have been a mistake about the church took
us to the cathedral of St. Gudule. Here, amid the superb spectrums of
the stained windows, we searched through the vari-colored throngs that
covered the floor, but no familiar face looked upon us. Strange to
us as the old, impassive monumental dukes of Brabant who occupy the
niches, the people made way to let us pass from the doorway between
the lofty brace of towers to the high altar, which is a juggler's
apparatus, and has concealed machinery causing the sacred wafer to
come down seemingly of its own accord at the moment when the priest is
about to lift the Host. All was unfamiliar and splendid, and we came
away, feeling as if our own little wedding-group would have been lost
in so magnificent a tabernacle.
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