the necessity of practising some
new hymn or chant for Sunday. Hyacinth worked as hard at the music as at
the tennis under her tuition, and there came a time when he could sing
an easy tenor part with fair accuracy. Then in the early summer, when
the evenings were warm, hymns were sung on the lawn in front of the
house. There seemed no incongruity in Marion Beecher's company in
passing without a break from lawn-tennis to hymn-singing, and Mr. Quinn
was always ready to do his best at the bass with a serious simplicity,
as if it were a perfectly natural and usual thing to close an
afternoon's amusement with 'Rock of Ages.' Hyacinth was not conscious of
any definite change in his attitude towards religion. He still believed
himself to be somehow outside the inner shrine of the life which the
Beechers and the Quinns lived, just as he had been outside his father's
prayers. But he found it increasingly difficult after an hour or two of
companionship with Marion Beecher to get back to the emotions which had
swayed him during the weeks of his intimacy with Miss Goold. To write
for the _Croppy_ after sitting beside Marion in church on Sunday
evenings was like passing suddenly from a quiet wood into a heated
saloon where people wrangled. A wave of the old passionate feeling, when
it returned, affected him as raw spirit would the palate of a boy.

One day early in summer--the short summer of Connaught, which is
glorious in June, and dissolves into windy mist and warm rain in the
middle of July--Hyacinth was invited by Canon Beecher to join a boating
party on the lake. The river, whose one useful function was the turning
of Mr. Quinn's millwheel, wound away afterwards through marshy fields
and groves of willow-trees into the great lake. At its mouth the
Beechers kept their boat, a cumbrous craft, very heavy to row, but safe
and suited to carry a family in comfort. The party started early--Canon
Beecher, Hyacinth, and one of the boys very early, for they had to
walk the two miles which separated Ballymoy from the lake shore. Mrs.
Beecher, the girls, the two other boys, and the baskets of provisions
followed a little later on the Rectory car, packed beyond all
possibility of comfort. The Canon himself pulled an oar untiringly, but
without the faintest semblance of style, and the party rippled with joy
when they discovered that Hyacinth also could row.

'Now,' said Elsie, 'we can go anywhere. We can go on rowing and rowing
all day,