“I jolly well would,” Chator agreed. “You ought to have played last football term.”
“Except that I like thinking,” said Michael. “Which is rotten in the middle of a game. It’s jolly decent going to the monastery, isn’t it? I could keep walking on this road for ever without getting tired.”
“We can ride again now,” said Chator.
“Well, don’t scorch, because we’ll miss all the decent flowers if you do,” said Michael.
Then silently for awhile they breasted the slighter incline of the summit.
“Only six weeks of these ripping holidays,” Michael sighed. “And then damned old school again.”
“Hark!” shouted Chator suddenly. “I hear the Angelus.”
Both boys dismounted and listened. Somewhere, indeed, a bell was chiming, but a bell of such quality that the sound of it through the summer was like a cuckoo’s song in its unrelation to place. Michael and Chator murmured their salute of the Incarnation, and perhaps for the first time Michael half realized the mysterious condescension of God. Here, high up on these downs, the Word became imaginable, a silence of wind and sunlight.
“I say, Chator,” Michael began.
“What?”