Then suddenly, while still thrilling with these joys, the mellow tones of the church-bell struck across the staccato sounds of life, and all at once the scene with his father the evening before and his own resolve to try to please him flashed into his mind. The bell, he knew, must be for the early celebration in the parish-church, and he had still twenty minutes, enough, if he was quick, in which to dress in the prescribed Sunday garb (though why black was suitable to Sunday he had long given up trying to guess, leaving it to rot away among the unconjecturable riddles of life), and, a thing which pleased his father so intensely, play the hymn on the melancholy one-manualled organ, the curious quavering tones of which formed so remarkable a contrast to the nasal notes of village voices. So with something of a sigh for his renunciation of the river-bank, he hurried back home, and before the bell had ceased ringing passed through the church-yard where yew-trees of noble growth looked down upon the horrors of the modern stone-mason with his “chaste” designs and “handsome” crosses into the grey, cool church. To judge by the interior it is probable that the mouth which Lady Sunningdale so much admired in the vicar and the Bishop of Tavistock was a low-church mouth, for Mr. Challoner at any rate did not attempt to make any appeal to the souls of his parishioners by means of the senses. Two brass flower-vases, of that curiously feeble design that somehow suggests at once low-church ecclesiasticism, stood on the altar, over which a flood of mauve and magenta light poured in through misshapen figures of apostles and prophets in the east window. In one transept stood the organ to which Martin directed his steps, the pipes of which, framed in a wooden border ornamented with fretsaw work, were painted white with a scroll of red pattern in line embellishing their top ends. Behind the organ-bench was a red plush curtain with golden fleurs-de-lys stamped on it, to screen the person of the organist from the eyes of the congregation. The seats for the people, who were thinly scattered over the church, were faced eastwards, and were made of shiny, varnished pitch-pine, while the floor of the aisles and accesses was tiled with a cheerful ecclesiastical pattern in violent blue and Indian red, and pierced here and there with gratings of cast-iron work through which, in winter, came the hot, stale blasts from the warming apparatus. A black iron stove stood near the font at the west end of the church, and rows of somewhat dilapidated rush-bottomed chairs denoted the place allotted to the school-children.