They stopped for tea at Ivychurch; the little inn and the big church beside the New Sewer were hazed over in a cloud of floating sunshine and dust. She had been here before with Martin, and after tea she and Albert went into the church and looked around them. But his interest in old places was not the same as Martin's. He called things "quaint" and "rummy," and quoted anything he had read about them in the guide-book, but he could not make them come alive in a strange re-born youth--he could not make her feel the beauty of the great sea on which the French ships had ridden, or the splendours of the Marsh before the Flood, with all its towns and taverns and steeples. Unconsciously she missed this appeal to her sleeping imagination, and her bringing of him into the great church, which could have held an the village in its aisles, was an effort to supply what was lacking. But Albert's attitude towards the church was critical and unsatisfactory. It was much too big for the village. It was ridiculous ... that little clump of chairs in all the huge emptiness ... what a waste of money, paying a parson to idle away his time among a dozen people.... "How Dreadful is this Place" ran the painted legend over the arches.... Joanna trembled. They came out on the farther side of the churchyard, where a little path leads away into the hawthorns of the New Sewer. A faint sunshine was spotting it through the branches, and suddenly Joanna's heart grew warm and heavy with love. She wanted some sheltered corner where she could hold his hand, feel his rough coat-sleeve against her cheek--or, dearer still, carry his head on her bosom, that heavenly weight of a man's head, with the coarse, springing hair to pull and stroke.... She put her arm into his. "Bertie, let's go and sit over there in the shade." He smiled at the innocence of her contrivance. "Shall we?" he said, teasing her--"won't it make us late for dinner?" "We don't have dinner on Sundays--we have supper at eight, so as to let the gals go to church." Her eyes looked, serious and troubled, into his. He pressed her hand. "You darling thing." They moved away out of the shadow of the church, following the little path down to the channel's bank. The water was of a clear, limpid green, new-flushed with the tide, with a faint stickle moving down it, carrying the white, fallen petals of the may. The banks were rich with loosestrife and meadowsweet, and as they walked on, the arching of hawthorn and willow made of the stream and the path beside it a little tunnel of shade and scent. The distant farmyard sounds which spoke of Ivychurch behind them gradually faded into a thick silence.