done their parts. At eleven in the morning Gaston had time on his hands.
Walking out, he saw two or three children peeping in at the gateway.

He would visit the village school. He found the junior curate troubling
the youthful mind with what their godfathers and godmothers did for them,
and begging them to do their duty "in that state of life," etc. He
listened, wondering at the pious opacity, and presently asked the
children to sing. With inimitable melancholy they sang: "Oh, the Roast
Beef of Old England!"

Gaston sat back and laughed softly till the curate felt uneasy, till the
children, waking to his humour, gurgled a little in the song. With his
thumbs caught lightly in his waistcoat pockets, he presently began to
talk with the children in an easy, quiet voice. He asked them little
out-of-the-way questions, he lifted the school-room from their minds, and
then he told them a story, showing them on the map where the place was,
giving them distances, the kind of climate, and a dozen other matters of
information, without the nature of a lesson. Then he taught them the
chorus--the Board forbade it afterwards--of a negro song, which told how
those who behaved themselves well in this world should ultimately:

"Blow on, blow on, blow on dat silver horn!"

It was on this day that, as he left the school, he saw Ian Belward
driving past. He had not met his uncle since his arrival,--the artist
had been in Morocco,--nor had he heard of him save through a note in a
newspaper which said that he was giving no powerful work to the world,
nor, indeed, had done so for several years; and that he preferred the
purlieus of Montparnasse to Holland Park.