On Sunday afternoon Edgar marched into the church, impassive and uninteresting to the outward vision, with Tim beside him, rapt and effective. Edgar stared vacantly into space, his feet marked the time at the proper distance from the crucifer, a mild and stolid youth, who could never understand why it was that just as he turned the corner and began to climb the steps to the choir-stalls his cassock should suddenly tighten below the knees and almost throw him. Edgar’s partner in the column could have informed him, but prudence rendered him uncommunicative. “_The brightest hopes we cherish here, How fast they tire and faint!_” Edgar’s brows met, he took a longer stride in reaching for his B flat, and the crucifer grasped his pole nervously and broke step a moment—his cassock had caught again. “_How many a spot defiles the robe That wraps an earthly saint!_” “He sings like an angel,” the rector mused. “How clumsy that Waters boy is!” Once through with the Psalter, which he loathed because he was not always certain of his pointing, and could not endure Tim’s look of horror at his occasional slips, Edgar, having hunched his shoulders at just the angle to prevent the tenor behind him from looking across into the transept, and ostentatiously opened his service at the _Nunc dimittis_, so that Tim might by his innocent nudging and indications of his own _Magnificat_ page call a frown and a fine from the choirmaster, devoted himself to a study of the rose-window over the transept. The decoration of this window was a standing subject of quarrel between him and the first alto, Howard Potter. Edgar had advanced the somewhat untenable proposition that the various figures in the stained-glass windows represented the successive rectors and choirmasters of St. Mark’s. Howard had objected that the dedications under the windows referred (as he had discovered by adroit questions that gave his informants no idea whatever of what he was driving at) to persons who had never held office of any kind in the church.