Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more, O never more."
—Shelley.
It is just two o'clock, and Sunday. They have all been to church. They have struggled manfully through their prayers. They have chanted a depressing psalm or two to the most tuneless of ancient ditties. They have even sat out an incomprehensible sermon with polite gravity and many a weary yawn.
The day is dull. So is the rector. So is the curate,—unutterably so.
Service over, they file out again into the open air in solemn silence, though at heart glad as children who break school, and wend their way back to Herst through the dismantled wood.
The trees are nearly naked: a short, sad, consumptive wind is soughing through them. The grass—what remains of it—is brown, of an unpleasant hue. No flowers smile up at them as they pass quietly along. The sky is leaden. There is a general air of despondency over everything. It is a day laid aside for dismal reflection; a day on which hateful "might have beens" crop up, for "melancholy has marked it for its own."
Yet just as they come to a turn in the park, two magpies (harbingers of good when coupled; messengers of evil when apart) fly past them directly across their path.
"'Two for joy!'" cries Molly, gayly, glad of any interruption to her depressing thoughts. "I saw them first. The luck is mine."
"I think I saw them first," says Sir Penthony, with no object beyond a laudable desire to promote argument.