“Alone?”
“Yes, only Master Jack.”
Canon Stensly bowed his iron-gray head under the Oriental curtain that screened the passage leading from the hall to the garden.
“Thanks; I know the way.”
The Rector of St. Antonia’s came out into the sunlight, and stood looking about him for an instant with the air of a man whose eyes were always open to what was admirable in life. A thrush had perched itself on the pinnacle of a yew, and was singing his vesper-song with the broad west for an altar of splendid gold. The chiming of the hour rang from St. Antonia’s steeple half hid by the green mist of its elms. A few trails of smoke rising from red-brick chimney-stacks alone betrayed the presence of a town.
To an old college-man such an evening brought back memories of sunny courts, cloisters, and sleek lawns, the ringing of bells towards sunset, the dark swirl of a river under the yawn of bridges that linked gardens to gardens beneath the benisons of mighty trees. Yet the light on Canon Stensly’s face was not wholly a placid light. It was as though he came as a messenger from the restless, bickering outer world, a friend whom friendship freighted with words not easy to be said.
A glimmer of white under an old cherry-tree showed where Catherine sat reading, with the boy Jack prone on the grass, the Swiss Family Robinson under his chin. Murchison was lying back in a deck-chair, watching the smoke from his pipe amid the foliage overhead.
Master Jack, rolling from elbow to elbow, as he thrilled over the passage of the “tub-boat” from the wreck, caught sight of the Canon crossing the lawn. Catherine was warned by a tug at her skirts, and a very audible stage-aside.
“Look out, here’s old Canon Stensly—”
“S-sh, Jack.”