After this there was nothing to be said, and they went out into the
carriage-way in front of the Abbey, side by side, and across the broad
expanse of turf, on which the cedars flung their wide stretching shadows,
and so by the Park to the corn-fields, where the corn waved green and
tall, and to the open common, above which the skylarks were soaring and
singing as if the whole world were wild with joy.

They had not much to talk about, being such utter strangers to each
other, and Brian Wendover naturally reserved and inclined to silence; but
the little he did say was made agreeable by a voice of singular richness
and melody--just such a voice as that deep and thrilling organ which
Canon Mozley has described in the famous Provost of Oriel, and which was
a marked characteristic of at least one of Bishop Coplestone's nephews--a
voice which gives weight and significance to mere commonplace.

Ida, not prone to shyness, was to-day as one stricken dumb. She could
not think of this man walking by her side, so unconscious of evil,
without unutterable humiliation. If he had been an altogether commonplace
man--pompous, underbred, ridiculous in any way--the situation would have
been a shade less tragic. But he came too near her ideal. This was the
kind of man she had dreamed of, and she had accepted in his stead the
first frivolous, foppish youth whom chance had presented to her, under a
borrowed name. Her own instinct, her own imagination, had told her the
kind of man Brian of the Abbey must needs be, and, in her sordid craving
for wealth and social status, she had allowed herself to be fobbed off
with so poor a counterfeit. And now her very ideal--the dark-browed
knight, with quiet dignity of manner, and that deep, earnest voice--had
come upon the scene; and she thought of her folly with a keener shame
than had touched her yet.