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Markborough.
The meetings of the commission were held in the Library of the Cathedral, once a collegiate church of the Cistercian order. All trace of the great monastery formerly connected with it had disappeared, except for the Library and a vaulted room below it which now made a passageway from the Deanery to the north transept.
The Library offered a worthy setting for high themes. The walls were, of course, wreathed in the pale golds and dignified browns of old books. A light gallery ran round three sides of the room, while a large perpendicular window at the farther end contained the armorial bearings of various benefactors of the see. Beneath the window was a bookcase containing several chained books--a Vulgate, a Saint Augustine, the Summa of St. Thomas; precious possessions, and famous in the annals of early printing. And wherever there was a space of wall left free, pictures or engravings of former bishops and dignitaries connected with the Cathedral enforced the message and meaning of the room.
A seemly, even beautiful place--pleasantly scented with old leather, and filled on this September afternoon with the sunshine which, on the Chase, was at the same moment kindling the heather into a blood-red magnificence. Here the light slipped in gently, subdued to the quiet note and standard of the old Library.
The Dean was in the Chair. He was a man of seventy who had only just become an old man, submitting with difficulty, even with resentment, to the weight of his years. He wore a green shade over his eyes, beneath which his long sharp nose and pointed chin--in the practical absence of the eyes--showed with peculiar emphasis. He was of heavy build, and suffered from chronic hoarseness. In his youth he had been a Broad churchman and a Liberal, and had then passed, through stages mysterious to his oldest friends, into an actively dogmatic and ecclesiastical phase. It was rumoured that he had had strange spiritual experiences; a "vision" was whispered; but all that was re