ready-made melody, sometimes improvising. The
words were not exactly a hymn, but they certainly fitted his Sunday
experience:--

"O me, O me, what frugal cheer
My love doth feed upon!
A touch, a ray, that is not here,
A shadow that is gone:

"A dream of breath that might be near,
An inly-echoed tone,
The thought that one may think me dear,
The place where one was known,

"The tremor of a banished fear,
An ill that was not done--
O me, O me, what frugal cheer
My love doth feed upon!"

Sometimes, when he took off his hat, shaking his head backward, and
showing his delicate throat as he sang, he looked like an incarnation
of the spring whose spirit filled the air--a bright creature, abundant
in uncertain promises.

The bells were still ringing when he got to Lowick, and he went into
the curate's pew before any one else arrived there. But he was still
left alone in it when the congregation had assembled. The curate's pew
was opposite the rector's at the entrance of the small chancel, and
Will had time to fear that Dorothea might not come while he looked
round at the group of rural faces which made the congregation from year
to year within the white-washed walls and dark old pews, hardly with
more change than we see in the boughs of a tree which breaks here and
there with age, but yet has young shoots. Mr. Rigg's frog-face was
something alien and unaccountable, but notwithstanding this shock to
the order of things, there were still the Waules and the rural stock of
the Powderells in their pews side by side; brother Samuel's cheek had
the same purple round as ever, and the three generations of decent
cottagers came as of old with a sense of duty to their betters
generally--the smaller children regarding Mr. Casaubon, who wore the
black gown and mounted to the highest box, as probably the chief of all
betters, and the one most awful if offended. Even in 1831 Lowick was
at peace, not more agitated by Reform than by the solemn tenor of the
Sunday sermon. The congregation had been used to seeing Will at church
in former days, and no one took much note of him except the choir, who
expected him to make a figure in the singing.

Dorothea did at last appear on this quaint background, walking up the
short aisle in her white beaver bonnet and gray cloak--the same she had
worn in the Vatican. Her face b