“He came to ask questions――to find out things. I didn’t see what he was up to till I had been talking to him for five minutes or more. But when I did――――” He broke off abruptly to throw a threatening look over his shoulder at the fugitive, who, some fifty yards or so down the road, had come to a standstill, and was watching them with irritating composure. Grif did his best to pacify the organist, but so long as Palmer remained in sight this was not easy. “I’m annoyed,” Mr. Bradley said, with a curious mixture of malignity and childishness, “very seriously annoyed:――so much annoyed that I won’t be able to give you a lesson――if you came for a lesson.” Then he suddenly remembered that Grif had been lost, and asked: “What happened to you? Your grandfather came to me last night, looking for you, saying you had disappeared.” “I came back to-day,” Grif told him. “And where have you come from now? You weren’t hiding in the church, were you? _You_ had nothing to do with this?” “No,” Grif hastened to reply, seeing him ready to flare out again. “I was asleep till I heard the noise.... I was reading, and I fell asleep――over there, under the wall.” The organist looked in the direction he pointed to. “Oh,” he said more mildly. “Well, well: and now, I suppose you want to have a singing-lesson?” “I don’t think so,” Grif answered. “I’m――I feel rather lazy to-day. Of course if you’d like me to――――” “No, no. Tell me where you’ve been to. We’ll go and sit down where you were sitting.” Grif left the Bible back in the church and rejoined Mr. Bradley under the wall. There they sat side by side, while the little boy related his adventure, and his companion nodded his head and said “hum――hum” at various places. Grif could talk to him easily, because he somehow felt that there was not really very much difference between them in point of age. That is to say, Mr. Bradley gave him the impression of looking at the world from much the same angle as he himself looked at it. He was serious over the same kind of things, and he had none of that wisdom which freezes up the flow of confidences, and makes one feel that they are rather silly and that one ought to have grown out of them. What Grif felt was that Mr. Bradley himself had _not_ grown out of them, and even if he had had a great deal of experience, it was for the most part experience of a similar kind. He was not, for instance, nearly so grown-up as Edward or Palmer. If he had told Edward or Palmer about hearing the flute they would have made him feel he was babyish, made him feel ashamed, whereas Mr. Bradley never for a moment doubted the truth of his story, merely grew interested and began to ask questions. “What was the tune you heard?――can you remember it?” Grif hesitated. “I think so.” “Sing it――sing it,” the organist urged him with a curious eagerness, and Grif sang the tune in an undertone.