Throughout the service Edgar was as one in a dream. His vision was turned inward, and he even forgot his effective trick of frightening the choirmaster into cold chills by looking vacantly uncertain of the proper moment to take up the choir’s share of the responses. The fact that he invariably came in at the precise beat had never fortified Mr. Fellowes against that nervous shudder as he saw his first soprano’s mouth open hesitatingly two seconds before the time. To-day he was spared all anxiety. Edgar’s voice and Tim’s eyes were the perfection of tuneful devotion. “_And blèss thine in-hèr-i-tànce!_” they implored softly. Neither of them had the remotest idea what inheritance meant—they would have besought as willingly a blessing for irrelevance or inelegance; but to the assistant clergyman, whose nervous scratching of his nose, while waiting for the alms-basin to reach him, was to Edgar and Tim as definite and eagerly awaited a part of the service as any other detail, the slow-syllabled Gregorian cadence brought the word in a sudden new light and he made it the text for a sermon so successful as to get him, a little later, a parish of his own. This leads us to many interesting conclusions, musical and other. The rector noticed with pleasure the seedy-looking man in the back of the church: he was just then smarting a little under the accusation of “aristocratic tendencies”: a body of conservatives had never approved of the boy-choir. He hoped to get the man into the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, if he were allied to no other organization. Mr. Ogden, as we know, was on business of his own—business that kept him glaring fixedly in the rector’s direction, which encouraged that good man still further. It is to be doubted if the Brotherhood would have appealed to him, however. Not that he would have been hindered by any narrow sectarian tendencies. Mrs. Ogden, who did up the shirt-waists of the Presbyterian minister’s daughter, was by her presented regularly with a missionary bank in the form of a _papier-maché_ cottage with a chimney imitating red brick; and Edgar, employing a Napoleonic strategy, triumphantly attended the Methodist Christmas festivals and the Baptist Sunday-school picnics, the latter society offering a merry-go-round on a larger scale, the former providing the infant faithful with more practicable presents and larger candy-bags. Squealer, moreover, had sung “The Holy City” more than once for the Congregational Christian Endeavor Society, so that Mr. Ogden felt, with a certain justice, that his church connection did him credit on the whole, and excused himself from any undue energy in that direction.