"I'm going up Orange Street too. It's the High School Governors' meeting, you know."
"Oh, yes, of course."
The two men started up the hill together. Ronder surveyed the scene around him with pleasure. Orange Street always satisfied his aesthetic sense. It was the street of the doctors, the solicitors, the dentists, the bankers, and the wealthier old maids of Polchester. The grey stone was of a charming age, the houses with their bow-windows, their pillared porches, their deep-set doors, their gleaming old-fashioned knockers, spoke eloquently of the day when the great Jane's Elizabeths and D'Arcys, Mrs. Morrises and Misses Bates found the world in a tea-cup, when passions were solved by matrimony and ambitions by the possession of a carriage and a fine pair of bays. But more than this was the way that the gardens and lawns and orchards ran unchecked in and out, up and down, here breaking into the street, there crowding a church with apple-trees, seeming to speak, at every step, of leisure and sunny days and lives free of care.
Ronder had never seen anything so pretty; something seemed to tell him that he would never see anything so pretty again.
Ryle was not a good conversationalist, because he had always before him the fear that some one might twist what he said into something really unpleasant, but, indeed, he found Ronder so agreeable that, as he told Mrs. Ryle when he got home, he "never noticed the hill at all."
"I hope you won't think me impertinent," said Ronder, "but I must tell you how charmed I was with the way that you sang the service on Sunday. You must have been complimented often enough before, but a stranger always has the right, I think, to say something. I'm a little critical, too, of that kind of thing, although, of course, an amateur...but--well, it was delightful."
Ryle flushed with pleasure to the very tips of his over-large ears.
"Oh, really, Canon...But indeed I hardly know what to say. You're too good. I do my poor best, but I can't help feeling that there is danger of one's becoming stale. I've been here a great many years now and I think some one fresh...."
"Well, often," said Ronder, "that is a danger. I know several cases where a change would be all for the better, but in your case there wasn't a trace of staleness. I do hope you won't think me presumptuous in saying this. I couldn't help myself. I must congratulate you, too, on the choir. How do you find Brockett as an organist?"
"Not quite all one would wish," said Ryle eagerly--and then, as though he remembered that some one might repeat this to Brockett, he added hurriedly, "Not that he doesn't do his best. He's an excellent fellow. Every one has their faults. It's only that he's a little too fond of adventures on his own account, likes to add things on the spur of the moment...a little fantastic sometimes."