contrived to find comfortable recreative resources during the service,
bringing all their inventive energy to bear on creating new diversions
as each Sunday came round. There was always their Aunt Hume's fur cloak
to stroke the wrong way, if there was nothing more diverting within
reach; had it only been the cat, whose sentiments regarding a like
treatment of her fur were too well known to Walter, he felt that the
pleasure would have been greater. Sometimes, indeed, the amusements were
of a strictly mental nature, conducted in the "chambers of imagery."
Miss Hume would feel gratified by the stillness of posture and the
earnest gaze in her nephew's eyes. They were certainly not fixed
directly on the preacher, but surely the boy must be listening, or he
would never be so quiet. Grace, however, was in the secret, and knew
better. Walter had confided to her that he had got such "a jolly
make-believe" to think about in church. The great chandelier which hung
from the centre of the church ceiling, with its poles, and chains, and
brackets, was transformed in his imagination to a ship's mast and
rigging, where he climbed and swung, and performed marvellous feats,
also in imagination, be it understood. And so it happened that Grace
could guess where her brother's thoughts were when he sat gazing
dreamily at the huge gilded chandelier of the city church.

Other imaginings had sometimes grown round it for Grace when it was all
lit up in the short winter days at afternoon service, and queer lights
and shadows fell on the gilded cherubs that decorated it, till their
wings seemed to move and hover over the heads of the congregation. To
Grace's childish mind they had been the embodiment of angels ever since
she could remember; and even long after childish things were put away
there remained a strange link between her conception of angelic beings
and those burnished cherubs whose serene, shining faces looked down
benignantly over the drowsy congregation on dark winter afternoons.