"I like him," she said to herself more than once. He was different from Giles; and Giles was her friend. Colin might in time become her friend; but this she doubted. She could not got to know him so quickly as she had got to know Giles. As they walked to church on Sunday morning following the private short-cut, where sunbeams made a swaying pattern of leaf-shadows on a mossy carpet, her attention wandered to him much. She listened for what he might say; she watched for what he might do. Each word and action on his part, though subdued, had in it something suggestive. Giles had not affected her thus. When with Giles she was mainly conscious of her own power over him. When with Colin she was mainly conscious of his power over her. Midfell Church and its services were plain, almost with an excess of simplicity; less from any wish on the part of Mr. Hazel than from a need to avoid startling the unsophisticated Midfell intellect by "innovations," a word which held terror for the Wyvernes and their coterie. Had such simplicity not been maintained, Phyllys would not have been allowed to enter the porch. Here things were otherwise, and she was carried back to childhood's days—to her father's church. Here was precisely what old Mrs. Wyverne had dreaded for her grandchild, and had condemned in her son. Not only an aged historic building, great in architectural beauty; but also more of completeness, more of cultivated perfection of form and sound, more of that which for years had been decried in the hearing of Phyllys as unsound, unspiritual, a form of godliness without life, perilous to true religion. Did it indeed mean peril? Was it perforce mere form, without life? Did no reality underlie the beauty of structure and of sound? Beauty there was; a perfection of rendering seldom reached in a country village; a well-trained choir; an organ of mellow tone, finely handled. There was, too, the outward seeming of deep reverence, in hushed stillness, in heads bowed reverently during prayers, in low voices joining in the responses. No hurried slurring on the part of Vicar or congregation, no shrill shouting on the part of the choir. All was controlled and appropriate, a worthy expression of the Church's adoration of her Divine Master. The Vicar, a college friend of Giles Randolph, seemed to be a man of unusual intensity of feeling, if the bent head and earnest face spoke truly.