Isabey and Richard Tremaine were standing on the little wharf jutting into the blue river, which danced in the afternoon light, when the fresh young voices of the negro children rose in a hymn. “Come,” said Richard, “I know that you are ashamed of singing so well, but give these little darkies a treat and sing their hymns with them.” Isabey went willingly enough with Richard into the garden. As they walked down the long, broad path, he saw Mrs. Tremaine enthroned upon the wooden bench under the lilacs at the end of the garden, while twenty-five or thirty negro children, from tall boys and girls down to small tots of four years old, were ranged in a semicircle around her. Angela was acting as concert master and led the simple singing. The voices of the negro children had the sweetness mixed with the shrillness of childhood, but for precision of attack and correctness of tone they would have put white children to the blush. As Isabey came up, Angela held out the prayer book to him and he sang with her from the same page. The negro children instantly turned their beady eyes upon him, but with a truer artistic sense than the congregation of Petworth Church, they kept on singing. Isabey’s supposed familiarity with the hymn tunes, which he had heard for the first time that day, pleased Mrs. Tremaine immensely, who had an idea that all well-bred persons were Episcopalians, and that Catholicism, in which Isabey had been bred, was a dark dream of the middle ages, which had now happily almost disappeared from the earth. When the Sunday-school was over and the little negro children had scampered back to the “quarters,” as the negro houses were called, Richard proposed the Sunday afternoon walk. This was as much a part of the Harrowby Sunday as was the three o’clock dinner. Usually, the whole family went upon this promenade up the cedar-bordered lane along which a footpath ran, edged with wild roses and blackberry bushes. But on this Sunday afternoon, Mrs. Tremaine gently declined, and took her exercise upon the broken flags of the Ladies’ Walk, Colonel Tremaine, with the air of a Louis Fourteenth courtier, escorting her. Archie begged off in order to ride over and spend the night at Greenhill with George Charteris, so only Angela and Lyddon were left to accompany Richard and Isabey. They started off a little after five o’clock and soon reached the woods across the high road. The declining sun shone through the branches on which the delicate foliage was not yet fully out. The grass under their feet was starred with the tiny blue forget-me-nots, and Angela knew where to find the trailing arbutus. Isabey, whose association with women had been almost wholly French, was secretly astonished at a young girl standing upon such a footing with men. Neither Lyddon nor Richard addressed much conversation to her, and that always half-joking, but it was plain to see that she had a part in their companionship and understood well what they were talking about.