"If it is not an impertinent question—though I rather think it is—what should you have done if you had not come?"
"I should have stayed with an aunt of mine. She wanted me, but she would not help Bertie, and I fancied that I could be of use to him. But I doubt if I can do him much good, and if I lost my situation I should only be a burden to him."
"Perhaps that might do him more good than anything," Percival suggested. "He might rise to the occasion and take life in earnest, which is just what he wants, isn't it? For any one can see how fond he is of you."
"He's a dear boy," Judith answered with a smile, and looked over her shoulder. The dear boy was not in sight.
"Plenty of time," said Percival. "But it is rather a long way for him, so often as he has to go to St. Sylvester's."
"He doesn't mind that. He says he can do it in less than ten minutes, only to-day he had to go back, you see."
"It isn't so far as it would be to St. Andrew's," Thorne went on. "By the way, have you ever been to your parish church?"
"Never. I don't think your description was very inviting."
"Oh, but it would be worth while to go once. The first time I went I thought it was like a quaint, melancholy dream. Such a dim, hollow, dusty old building, and little cherubs with grimy little marble faces looking down from the walls. When the congregation began to shuffle in each new-comer was more decrepit and withered than the last, till I looked to see if they could really be coming through the doorway from the outer world, or whether the vaults were open and they were the ghosts of some dead-and-gone congregation of long ago. And when I looked round again, there was the clergyman in a dingy surplice, as if he had risen like a spectre in his place. He stared at us all with his dull old eyes, and turned the leaves of a great book. And all at once he began to read, in a piping voice so thin and weak that it sounded just like the echo of some former service—as if it had been lost in the dusty corners, and was coming back in a broken, fragmentary way. It was all the more like an echo because the old clerk is very deaf, and he begins in a haphazard fashion when he thinks it is time for the other to have done. So sometimes there is a long pause, and then you have their two old voices mixed up together, like an echo when it grows confused. It is very strange—gives one all manner of quaint fancies. You should go once. Nothing could be more utterly unlike St. Sylvester's."
"I think I will go," said Judith. "I know a church something like that, only not quite so dead. There is a queer old clerk there too."