Lucy, did not reply, because she had nothing at hand to say. The
bookseller feared he had hurt her.
"And so you couldn't find this Mr. Fuller? Well, you leave it to me.
I'll find him, and let you know in the afternoon."
"Thank you, Mr. Kitely. Just tell Mattie, will you? I must run home
now, but I'll come in in the afternoon to hear how you have succeeded."
About six o'clock, Lucy reëntered Mr. Kitely's shop, received the
necessary directions to find the "parson," ran up to tell Mattie that
she was going, for the child had not come down stairs, and then set out.
To succeed she had to attend to Mr. Kitely's rather minute
instructions; for although the parsonage lay upon the bank of one of
the main torrents of city traffic, it was withdrawn and hidden behind
shops and among offices, taverns, and warehouses. After missing the
most direct way, she arrived at last, through lanes and courts, much
to her surprise, at the border of a green lawn on the opposite side of
which rose a tree that spread fair branches across a blue sky filled
with pearly light, and blotted here and there with spongy clouds that
had filled themselves as full of light as they could hold. The other
half of the branches of the same tree spread themselves across the
inside of a gable, all that remained of a tavern that was being pulled
down. The gable was variegated with the incongruous papers of many
small rooms, and marked with the courses of stairs and the holes for
the joints of the floors; and this dreariness was the background for
the leaves of the solitary tree. On the same side was the parsonage,
a long, rather low, and country-looking house, from the door of which
Lucy would not have been surprised to see a troop of children burst
with shouts and laughter, to tumble each other about upon the lawn, as
smooth, at least, if not as green, as any of the most velvety of its
kind. One side of the square was formed by a vague, commonplace mass of
dirty and expressionless London houses--what they might be used for no
one could tell--one of them, probably, an eating-house--mere walls with
holes to let in the little light that was to be had. The other side was
of much the same character, only a little better; and the remaining
side was formed by the long barn-like wall of the church, broken at
regular intervals by the ugly windows, with their straight sides
filled with parallelograms, and their half-circle heads filled with
trapeziums--the ugliest window that can be made, except it be redeemed
with stained glass, the window that makes the whole grand stretch of
St. Paul's absolutely a pain. The church was built of brick, nearly
black below, but retaining in the upper part of the square tower
something of its original red. All this Lucy took in at a glance as she
went up to the door of the parsonage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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