“Who is the manager?”
“The husband of the leading lady. His name is Skoot.”
“Don’t like the name,” said Ralph, laughing.
“Why what’s in a name?” said Ivy. “The poor man didn’t choose it. For my part I think it is better than assuming some grand name that doesn’t belong to him. And then his Christian name is Theophilus.”
But Ralph still laughed.
“Worse and worse,” he said. “Theophilus Skoot is a detestable combination. Dick, Tom, or Harry, would have been better. No, no, Ivy; I think we had better stay where we are.”
Ivy looked much disheartened, and to change the subject Ralph suggested that they should go together to the Abbey. This pleased her, she forgot the Scotch tour and only revelled in the bliss of the present. To walk to church on Christmas day with her ideal man, to feel the subtle influence of the beautiful Abbey, the lights, the music, the religious atmosphere, seemed to her a sort of foretaste of heaven, a slightly sensuous heaven perhaps, but the highest she was as yet capable of imagining. Ralph was not sorry to have the child with him, for his Christmas had been lonely enough. But his thoughts wandered far away from her during the service. He was back again at Whinhaven listening to his father’s voice, or he was with Evereld and her governess listening to solemn old chorales at Dresden.
Presently a very slight thing recalled him to his actual surroundings. The sermon was about to begin and some one sitting in front of him rose to go just as the text was given out:
“And in the fulness of time God sent———”
He heard no more for the vacant place had revealed to him, at a little distance in front, a profile which arrested his whole attention. Something in its earnest, absorbed expression, in its exquisite purity, in the listening look of one who is eager to learn, appealed to him strongly. Then suddenly his heart gave a bound, for it was borne in upon him that he was looking at Evereld. Not the Evereld he had left on that summer day as a playmate and comrade, but a new Evereld who had developed into a woman—the one woman in all the world for him. He did not wish the sermon ended, he could have been almost content to sit on there for ever just watching her; that curious description of heaven as a place