odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves. Will went along with a small book under his arm and a hand in each side-pocket, never reading, but chanting a little, as he made scenes of what would happen in church and coming out. He was experimenting in tunes to suit some words of his own, sometimes trying a ready-made melody, sometimes improvising. The words were not exactly a hymn, but they certainly fitted his Sunday experience:—
“O me, O me, what frugal cheer My love doth feed upon! A touch, a ray, that is not here, A shadow that is gone:
“A dream of breath that might be near, An inly-echoed tone, The thought that one may think me dear, The place where one was known,
“The tremor of a banished fear, An ill that was not done— O me, O me, what frugal cheer My love doth feed upon!”
Sometimes, when he took off his hat, shaking his head backward, and showing his delicate throat as he sang, he looked like an incarnation of the spring whose spirit filled the air—a bright creature, abundant in uncertain promises.
The bells were still ringing when he got to Lowick, and he went into the curate’s pew before anyone else arrived there. But he was still left alone in it when the congregation had assembled. The curate’s pew was opposite the rector’s at the entrance of the small chancel, and Will had time to fear that Dorothea might not come while he looked round at the group of rural faces which made the congregation from year to year within the whitewashed walls and dark old pews, hardly with more change than we see in the boughs of a tree which breaks here and there with age, but yet has young shoots.