illie--is
delightful. Katherine, the elder sister, is married now. She too is
charming, but in a different, graver way."

He spoke of them all with a serious lingering pleasure, as though he
were summoning them all into the dusty, stuffy corridor, carrying them
with him into these strange countries and perilous adventures.

"They always laughed at me--Millie especially; I've stayed sometimes
with them at Garth. But I didn't mean really to talk about _them_--I
only wanted to show you how deeply Glebeshire matters to the
Trenchards, and whatever happens, wherever a Trenchard goes, he always
really takes Glebeshire with him. I was born in Polchester, as I said.
My father had a little property there, but we always lived in a little
round bow-windowed house in the Cathedral Close. I was simply brought
up on the Cathedral. From my bedroom windows I looked on the whole of
it. In our drawing-room you could hear the booming of the organ. I was
always watching the canons crossing the cathedral green, counting the
strokes of the cathedral bell, listening to the cawing of the
cathedral rooks, smelling the cathedral smell of cold stone, wet
umbrellas and dusty hassocks, looking up at the high tower and
wondering whether anywhere in the world there was anything so grand
and fine. My moral world, too, was built on the cathedral--on the
cathedral 'don'ts' and 'musts,' on the cathedral hours and the
cathedral prayers, and the cathedral ambitions and disappointments. My
father's great passion was golf. He was not a religious man. But my
mother believed in the cathedral with a passion that was almost a
disease. She died looking at it. Her spirit is somewhere round it now,
I do believe."

He paused, then went on:

"It was the cathedral that made me so unpractical, I suppose. I who am
an only child--I believed implicitly in what I was told and it always
was my mother who told me everything."

He was, I thought, the very simplest person to whom I had ever
listened. The irritation that I had already felt on several occasions
in his company again returned. "My father's great passion was golf"
would surely in the mouth of another have had some tinge of irony.

In Trenchard's mild blue eyes irony was an incredible element. I could
fancy what he would have to say to the very gentlest of cynics; some
of the sympathy I had felt for him during the afternoon had left me.

"He's very little short of an idiot," I thought. "He's going to be
dre