He hastily pulled out his watch—half-past ten, English time. She, down in the quiet Kentish vale, had remembered his promise (indeed, had she not dreamed of it all day?) had gone to her window, and tenderly thought of her lover, and with happy tears in her eyes had sent him many a kindly message across the sea; _he_—what his thoughts had been at the same moment he scarcely dared confess to his awakened self. CHAPTER XIV. THE OUTCAST. "Quite true, my dear," said Mr. Anerley, gently. "If I had risen at six, gone and dipped myself in the river, and then taken a walk, I should have been in a sufficiently self-satisfied and virtuous frame of mind to have accompanied you to church. But I try to avoid carnal pride. Indeed, I don’t know how Satan managed to develop so much intolerable vanity, unless he was in the habit of rising at a prodigiously early hour and taking a cold bath." "Oh, papa, how dare you say such a thing?" said a soft voice just beside him; and he turned to the open breakfast-room window to see Dove’s pretty face, under a bright little summer bonnet, looking in at him reproachfully. "Come, get away to church, both of you," he said. "There goes the cracked bell." So Mrs. Anerley and Dove went alone to church; the former very silent and sad. The tender little woman could do nothing for this husband of hers—nothing but pray for him, in an inaudible way, during those moments of solemn silence which occur between divisions of the service. A quarter of an hour afterwards Mr. Anerley rose, and also walked along to the little grey building. All the people by this time were inside; and as he entered the churchyard the choir was singing. He sate down on one of the gravestones that were placed among the long, green, rank grass; and having pulled his straw hat over his forehead, to shelter his eyes and face from the strong sunlight, he listened, in a dreamy way, to the sweet singing of the children and the solemn and soft intoning of the organ. It was his favourite method of going to church. "You get all the emotional exaltation of the service," he used to say, "without having your intellect ruffled. And when the children have done their singing, instead of listening to a feeble sermon, you sit out in the clear sunlight and look down on the quiet valley, and the river, and the trees." So he sate, and listened and dreamed, while the softened music played upon his fancies, and produced a moving panorama of pious scenes—of the old Jew-life, the early Christian wanderings, the mediæval mysteries, and superstitions, and heroisms.