"Oh, but it would be worth while to go once. The first time I went I thought it was like a quaint, melancholy dream. Such a dim, hollow, dusty old building, and little cherubs with grimy little marble faces looking down from the walls. When the congregation began to shuffle in each new-comer was more decrepit and withered than the last, till I looked to see if they could really be coming through the doorway from the outer world, or whether the vaults were open and they were the ghosts of some dead-and-gone congregation of long ago. And when I looked round again, there was the clergyman in a dingy surplice, as if he had risen like a spectre in his place. He stared at us all with his dull old eyes, and turned the leaves of a great book. And all at once he began to read, in a piping voice so thin and weak that it sounded just like the echo of some former service--as if it had been lost in the dusty corners, and was coming back in a broken, fragmentary way. It was all the more like an echo because the old clerk is very deaf, and he begins in a haphazard fashion when he thinks it is time for the other to have done. So sometimes there is a long pause, and then you have their two old voices mixed up together, like an echo when it grows confused. It is very strange--gives one all manner of quaint fancies. You should go once. Nothing could be more utterly unlike St. Sylvester's." "I think I will go," said Judith. "I know a church something like that, only not quite so dead. There is a queer old clerk there too." "Where is that?" "Oh, it isn't anywhere near here. A little old-fashioned country town--Rookleigh." Percival turned eagerly: "Where did you say? _Rookleigh_?" "Yes. Why, do you know anything of it?" "Tell me what you know of it." "My aunt, Miss Lisle, lives there--the aunt I was telling you about, who wanted me to stay with her." "And you were there last summer?" "Yes. In fact, I was there on a visit when I heard that--that our home was broken up. I stayed on for some time: I had nowhere to go." "Miss Lisle lives in a red house by the river-side," said Percival, prompted by a sudden impulse. It was Judith's turn to look surprised: "Yes, she does. But, Mr. Thorne, how do you know?" "The garden slopes to the water's edge," he went on, not heeding her. "And there is a wide gravel-path down the middle, cutting it exactly in two. It is all very neat--it is wonderfully neat--and Miss Lisle comes down the path, looking right and left to see whether all the carnations and the chrysanthemum-plants are tied up properly, and whether there are any snails." "Mr. Thorne, who told you--? No, you must have seen." "But you didn't walk with her. There was a cross-path behind some evergreens." "Yes," said Judith: "I hated to be seen then. I couldn't go beyond the garden, and I used to walk backward and forward there, so many times to a mile--I forget how many now. But, Mr. Thorne, tell me, how do you know all this?"