Sunday.  All classes meeting on the way to church, when Cyril preaches for the first time to his friends and neighbours, who throng to hear him.  He preaches with passionate earnestness upon the beauty of innocence and the agony of losing it.  “That once lost,” he says, “the old careless joy of youth never returns.”

The village parliament in the moonlit churchyard after service comment with humour on the sermon, and on Cyril’s eloquence, learning, and good heart.  Granfer, the village oracle, prophesies that the queen will make a bishop of him.  Ben Lee, talking with Judkins by the harness-room fire, supposes that Cyril was thinking of Alma in his sermon.  “He always had a kind heart.”  But Judkins speaks of his suspicions of Everard as Alma’s betrayer, alludes to his frequent visits to Mrs.

Lee during her illness some months ago, and his constant meeting with Alma.  Lee is convinced of Everard’s guilt.  “I’ll kill him!” he cries furiously.

II.—­Sin-Engendered Sin

It is a lovely winter’s day, and Cyril, Lilian, and Everard are walking through the woods at the back of Lee’s cottage.  Cyril puts something into a hollow tree, and intimates a chaffinch’s call.  Another bird replies.  Cyril walks on to Oldport, leaving Everard and Lilian, between whom there follows a warm love scene and betrothal.  During this episode Mrs. Lee, Alma’s stepmother, tells her husband that Alma is gone to meet her unknown lover in the wood at the signal of a chaffinch’s call.  Lee follows, and finds Alma there alone.  He picks up a paper she had torn and dropped; it contains an assignation for that evening at dusk.  Before luncheon Everard changes the grey suit he was wearing, and had stained in a muddy ditch.  He goes to a lonely cottage on the downs in the afternoon; returning in the evening, he gets a black eye while romping with little Winnie Maitland.  After bathing the eye, he sponges the stained suit, and is surprised to find blood on it.  Cyril has been absent in Oldport all day, and on his return goes to bed with a headache, speaking to nobody.  A man in Henry’s grey suit passes through the hall at dusk, followed by the cat, who never runs after anyone but Lilian and Cyril.

That evening, New Year’s eve, there is a gay party of rustics at the wheelwright’s house.  In the midst of Granfer’s best story in rushes Grove, the waggoner, crying that Ben Lee had just been found murdered in the wood.  The same night Alma gives birth to a son.

Next day, Cyril, in great mental anguish, goes to Admiral Everard’s house, and incidentally puts to a brother clergyman there a case of conscience:  Should a man who has acted unwisely, and is guilty of unintentional homicide, imperil a useful and brilliant career by confession?  Not if he had such great gifts and opportunities of doing good as Cyril has, he is told.  By this pronouncement and a love scene with Marion, Cyril is much comforted.