The chants to which the psalms were sung at St. Luke’s had been specially composed for the school chapel by Dr. Downton, the organist, who had fitted them with modulations that were, at the least, surprising to ears which could not be happy or feel secure far from the present help of tonic and dominant. Most of the congregation at St. Luke’s considered that Sammy’s tunes were rotten. At first they were inflicted upon the choir in manuscript; but in Edwin’s second summer they appeared collected in a slim gray volume, and Heal, who acted as choirmaster, explained that they were the results of the most careful study of the Hebrew text, of night-long ecstasies, and the deep brooding of Dr. Downton’s mind. It gave Edwin a picture of Sammy, with his gray, impassive face, weaving his tunes out of the silence of the night by candlelight in the high turret-room which that solitary master inhabited, and for this alone he began to love the St. Luke’s Psalter. It is certain, at any rate, that his early acquaintance with strange harmonic ideas made a great deal of the most modern music easy to him in after years. Later, in North Bromwich, when he became immersed in the flood of Wagner, he often wondered whether Sammy in his lonely tower, had known these wonders, and cherished them up there all by himself. He certainly couldn’t associate that sort of music with the naïvetés of Mr. Heal’s flute. And yet, you never can tell. . . . Mr. Heal knew his Hardy. . . . Then there were Sunday walks with Widdup over the downs under a grilling sun, and through the woods of York Park, where Griffin and Douglas, poaching, had encountered keepers; but the glare and dryness of a chalk country in summer does not invite exercise, and the most precious hours of all were spent on the sloping banks between the Grand Entrance and the chapel. Here, early on a Sunday morning, Edwin and Widdup would carry out an armful of rugs and cushions: and there all day they would lie in the shade of the limes, reading, writing letters (Ingleby always had a letter from his mother to answer on Sundays), watching the restless flight of little copper butterflies, seeing the hot sky deepen to an almost southern blue behind the pointed gables of the school. Against such skies the red brick of St. Luke’s became amazingly beautiful. It seemed to Edwin that in his home, on the edge of the black country, the sky was never so clear and deep. Lying there he would read the books that he had smuggled out of the library . . . poetry . . . a great deal of it. Novels . . . he read, and he always remembered reading, Poe’s _Tales of Mystery and Imagination_: “The Murder in the Rue Morgue,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death.” Such titles! There seemed to be no end to the leisure of those days.