"There! my dear!" said the Archdeacon. "And what are you doing this afternoon, Joan?"
"I'm going with mother," she said, "to see Miss Ronder. It's time we called, you know."
"I suppose it is." Brandon patted her cheek. "Everything you want?"
"Yes, father, thank you."
"That's right."
He left the house, humming a little tune. On the second step he paused, as he was in the habit of doing, and surveyed the Precincts--the houses with their shining knockers, their old-fashioned bow-windows and overhanging portals, the Cathedral Green, and the towering front of the Cathedral itself. He was, for a moment, a kind of presiding deity over all this. He loved it and believed in it and trusted it exactly as though it had been the work of his own hands. Halfway towards the Arden Gate he overtook poor old shambling Canon Morphew, who really ought, in the Archdeacon's opinion, to have died long ago. However, as he hadn't died the Archdeacon felt kindly towards him, and he had, when he talked to the old man, a sense of beneficence and charity very warming to the heart.
"Well, Morphew, enjoying the sun?"
Canon Morphew always started when any one spoke to him, being sunk all day deep in dreams of his own, dreams that had their birth somewhere in the heart of the misty dirty rooms where his books were piled ceiling-high and papers blew about the floor.
"Good afternoon...good afternoon, Archdeacon. Pray forgive me. You came upon me unawares."
Brandon moderated his manly stride to the other's shuffling steps.