After an incredible space of time the nature of the noise without changed again. Prominent in it was the sound of shod feet on the stone floor. She stole back to her position and was, once again, surprised. All signs of the feasting had been removed; the revellers were clothed again. They and the church presented the ordinary Sunday-morning scene. Even as she looked, they all went down on their knees, not quite in the manner of churchgoers, though; they knelt with their hands and heads lowered to the floor and their rumps in the air. She remembered suddenly another word she had read, ‘parody’.

The door through which, every Sunday, Canon Thorby emerged from his vestry opened, and two figures stepped into the church. One was Ethel Rigby, clad from neck to heels in a scarlet cloak embroidered all over with cabalistic symbols in black and white. A circlet of red flowers rested on her head, and below it her fawn-coloured hair streamed softly down. She had a wide-eyed, tranced look. Sleepwalking? Doped? Drunk? Beaten into a state where the last possible resistance lay in a deliberating absenting of the self? Even as she asked these questions in her mind, another, far more vital question occurred to Miss Mayfield, and suddenly she was shaking as though stricken with palsy, sweating at every pore.

What am I going to do?

You silly, silly, blundering, bumbling daft old fool! There’s no excuse for you. You knew. You’d read about it. How could you be so plumb crazy as to think that you could save this girl? How, in God’s name? With a cine-camera? You guessed, you suspected, you knew. You were going to save Ethel. And you took no sensible, practical measure at all.

The shattering realization of her madness and inefficiency coincided with her recognition of the other figure. Seven feet tall – but that was an illusion lent by the high silver headdress, the long white-silver girt robe. Very tall, very proud, dominant. And she had never seen Isabel Thorby except as limp and drooping, negative and retreating. But it was Isabel Thorby who held Ethel’s hand and brought her forward and said in Latin:

‘I bring the bride.’

And in the corrupt dog Latin that had come down to them by word of mouth through who knew how many ages, they replied solemnly:

‘May she find favour in his sight.’

Miss Thorby said:

‘Behold the bride,’ and as she spoke, she twitched away the cloak. Ethel’s nakedness had a classic beauty because of her unawareness. Smooth and white and slim as a statue, and as unknowing.

Holding her hand, Miss Thorby led her to the altar, and Ethel lay down, her hands clasped behind her head, one knee raised.

‘We are met,’ Miss Thorby said.

‘We are met. We await his coming.’