"All right," Archie replied, "I'm keen enough to hear it. Was it hot in town? You look rather done."
A groom took the reins and drove off. Mark stared at the cathedral.
"It lies in a golden chalice," he said, indicating the haze which obscured the insignificant buildings of the town while lightening and revealing the splendid mass of stone, too heavy, too colourless when seen beneath grey skies.
"Good point that," said Archie, nodding his handsome head.
The brothers walked across a strip of down, and found themselves near a clump of trees. Mark pulled from his pocket a sheaf of manuscript, and read aloud.
Archie lay flat on his back. Presently he sat up, staring at the cathedral. Then he fixed his eyes on Mark's face, where they remained, fascinated, till the last word was said.
"Now," Mark commanded, "I want you to declaim a bit of it—standing. You can give it all I cannot. Do you mind?"
Archibald took the manuscript, sensible of emotions and thrills never experienced before. Dominating these was the wish to do as he was asked—to declaim a part of the sermon. He felt a desire to possess himself of it, to incorporate with it his own physical attributes.
"Let yourself go," said Mark. He watched his brother's face intently, thinking that he would exchange the brains which had composed the sermon for the body now bending over it in envy and admiration. Archie had a gift for committing verse to memory. At Harrow he often boasted that he could read through a long ode of Horace and repeat it without making a blunder.
Presently Archie stood up, his massive proportions outlined against the amber-coloured sky. Although barely thirty, he had acquired a certain dignity of deportment, an air of maturity, in curious contrast to blooming cheeks and shining eyes. This aspect is not uncommon in young clergymen who take themselves seriously. Looking at Archibald Samphire, one might predict that in a few years he would assume the solidity of a pillar of the Church. Already, in the eyes of the spinsters in and around Westchester Close, he was regarded as a staff upon which the weak might safely and gratefully lean; already, when he gave an opinion, soft eyes gazed upward suffused with moisture.