The man, half--asleep, obeyed; Ned opened the keyboard, and not knowing his instrument put on full diapason. Thus, when the last Amen had echoed out from the Rector, for the choir appeared to be dummies, and the cope and the brass platter began to follow the little white surplices, the whole procession paused in amazement, as, with many a note dumb, many a dissonance overborne by the full burst of sound, Handel's "Lift up your heads, oh! ye gates," crashed into every corner of the old church. Crashed for the first two bars, then, the pressure on leaky bellows yielding, wavered and sank. Ned, realising his failure, was down the loft stairs, through the graves, and over the back of the churchyard wall, where he lay convulsed with inextinguishable laughter at his own mad prank, before curiosity followed the amazement in the church as the last breath of air escaped in a long-drawn pipe from a stuck note in the treble. It was some time ere, seeing the chapel folk coming out, he made his way round at the back of the Rectory wood and joined Ted, whom he found enthusiastic about the singing, and glad to have heard the Reverend Morris Pugh's "hwl," the bardic note. It was really rather impressive, that constant iteration of the A-flat, and even to one ignorant of Welsh gave a feeling of something being desperately wrong, of something needing desperately to be set right. But there had been no outpouring--nothing out of the common. "You should have----" said Ned, and paused. "What?" asked Ted. "Nothing, except that it must be about time for us to be going back--to Paradise!" CHAPTER IV Aurelia in a blessed white frock, looking like a Botticelli angel, was in the garden talking to old Adam. She received their half-hearted apologies for return with a fine superiority. "Of course," she said, "we all knew you were coming. Martha was unkind enough to kill a beautiful white chicken for you, and there is raspberry tart, and curds and cream. Oh yes! and I made a sponge-cake for tea. So you ought to have enough I'm sure. Now, before we go in, I do want to find my Ourisia coccinea, and Adam has mislaid it. Now, Adam, do think! and please don't say the underground mice have eaten the label, for I'm sure they haven't--it would be a miracle, you know, if they did." Here she turned to her companions with shining eyes. "You see, Adam believes in boggles and miracles, and all sorts of queer things, though he isn't Welsh. And to-day there was a miracle in church." "A miracle," echoed Ned, flushing slightly and wondering more. She nodded. "Yes! The organ that hasn't sounded a note for ever so long, played of itself, or rather Griffiths Morgan, the sexton, says he was awoke by the Archangel Gabriel." "Nonsense," interrupted Ned with spirit, "it--it couldn't have been----" "That is what Adam says," replied Aurelia smiling. "Adam! tell the story yourself."