“Oh yes—we had a couple of tables at the Men’s Institute in my last parish. I shall be very pleased to come,” said Andy.
So he went away down the road, feeling that pleasant as the world had been that morning early, it was immensely more delightful now.
Two urchins watched him go up the road, then squashed disreputable hats down on their brows and began to imitate his professional stride which he had unconsciously copied on first arrival in London from the senior curate.
“Parson Andy walks like this! Parson Andy walks like this!” they chanted together under their breath, stepping down the road behind him.
For by this abbreviation was the Reverend Andrew Deane already known to his parishioners. It was inevitable, of course, but as yet he remained in blissful ignorance of the fact, and only the night before had secretly burned a satin tie-case on which a tactless cousin had embroidered ‘Andy.’
As he went across the churchyard, taking the short-cut home, he glanced once more at the gravestone of Gulielmus; and having glanced, he stood a moment, thinking.
It was most probable that this dead brother of his had been entertained by a Stamford of Gaythorpe Manor, just as he had been. Will Ford—who was now Gulielmus—had no doubt walked back by the very path beside which his body now lay sleeping.
What had he felt? Why had he never married? How had life gone with him?
Andy was standing very still in the warm quiet of the spring afternoon when suddenly a sense of jolly-good-fellowship and kindness seemed to fill his spirit—as if some comrade had passed that way and shouted a merry greeting. There was nothing strange or abnormal about it, either then or in the ineffaceable after-remembrance of it.
Only—Andy had felt on his first journey to Gaythorpe as if, across the centuries, he greeted a brother; now he felt as if, across the centuries, a brother greeted him.