ONE:To-night they would walk and sit on the parade till supper time, then go to some coffee-house, and wind up at a music-hall. It was a gay programme and they discussed it happily, glanced at the passers-by, inspected the empty bandstand, and finally sat down on one of the seats to watch the fishing-boats trim their lamps in the amethyst fog of the sea. For some time they talked about the terrible licking the United had given Rye, arguing about this or that player, and speculating as to what would be the Club's fate at Hythe next week.It would have been still worse if Gray had rented his farm of one whose religious principles were more defined than De Boteler's; but even he, though he would not drive them from the soil, refused to take recompense for the small portion of land that the man himself could attend to, and even this portion, small as it was, presented little of the healthy and cultivated appearance that his broad fields had formerly exhibited. Sickness often came; and there was the enervating consciousness of being a shunned and solitary man. Then, too, there were domestic bitterness and mutual upbraidings and reproaches; and often did the once industrious and light-hearted Giles, instead of saving his hay or cutting down his slender crop, lie the whole day beneath the shadow of a tree, brooding in gloomy discontent over the dark prospect before him.
THREE:
THREE:Then came an evening in April, when the air smelled of primroses and young leaves. The choir practice was early, and rifts of sunshine sloped up the clerk's kitchen, linking in one golden slant Robert's dark healthy face just under the ceiling, Bessie's shoulders pressed against his arm, the frail old hands of Joe Hearsfield on his flute, and the warm plum-brown of the bass viol close to the floor. To Robert it was all a dream of holiness and harmony. Old Spodgram confined himself almost entirely to two notes, Miss Hubble insisted on her four bars of arrears, young Ditch extemporised an alto of surprising reediness, and Robert bellowed the last lines of the last verse just as the other choristers were loudly taking in breath preparatory to line threebut the whole thing was to him a foretaste of Paradise and the angels singing ever world without end.