loved to hang over the parapet watching for trout--but not
tonight, for it was late, and Isabel after a "company tea" wanted
her supper: by a footpath through the churchyard, closely mown
and planted with rosebushes: and so into the church, where, after
dropping a hurried professional curtsey to the altar, she set
about her evening duties. Isabel called herself the curate, but
she did a good deal which is not expected of a curate, such as
shutting windows and changing lesson-markers, propping up the
trebles when they went astray in the pointing of the Psalms,
altering the numbers on the hymn-board, writing out choir papers,
putting flowers in the vases and candles in the benediction
lights, playing the organ as required and occasionally blowing
it. . . . Before leaving the church she fell on her knees, in
deference to Mr. Stafford and the text by the door, and said a
prayer. What did she pray? "O Lord bless this church and all
who worship in it and make father preach a good sermon next
Sunday. I wish I'd been playing with Val instead of Jack, we
should have won that last set if Jack hadn't muffed his
services. . . . Well, this curate was only nineteen."

And then, coming out into the fading light, she locked the north
door behind her and went off whistling like a blackbird, if a
blackbird could whistle the alto of Calkin's Magnificat in B
flat. . . . Five minutes climbing of the steep brown floor of
the beechwood, and she was out on uplands in the dying fires of
day. It had been twilight in the valley, but here the wide plain
was sunlit and the air was fresh and dry: in the valley even the
river-aspens were almost quiet, but here there was still a sough
of wind coming and going, through the dry grass thick set with
lemon thyme and lady's slipper, or along the low garden wall