ear 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."

"Where is that?"

"Oh, it isn't anywhere near here. A little old-fashioned country
town--Rookleigh."

Percival turned eagerly: "Where did you say? _Rookleigh_?"

"Yes. Why, do you know anything of it?"

"Tell me what you know of it."

"My aunt, Miss Lisle, lives there--the aunt I was telling you about, who
wanted me to stay with her."

"And you were there last summer?"

"Yes. In fact, I was there