Isabel knew every one in Chilmark parish.  Pausing before a knot of boys playing marbles:  “Herbert,” she said sternly, “why weren’t you at school on Sunday?” Old Hewett, propped like a wheezy mummy against the oak tree that shaded the Prince of Wales’s Feathers, brought up his stiff arm slowly in a salute to the vicar’s daughter. “’Evening,” said Isabel cheerfully, “what a night for rheumatics isn’t it?” Hewitt chuckled mightily at this subtle joke. “’Evening, Isabel,” called out Dr. Verney, putting up one finger to his cap:  he considered one finger enough for a young lady whom he had brought into the world.  Isabel knew every one in Chilmark and every one knew her.  Such a range of intensive acquaintance is not so narrow as people who have never lived in a country village are apt to suppose.

Past the schoolhouse, past the wide stone bridge where Isabel loved to hang over the parapet watching for trout—­but not tonight, for it was late, and Isabel after a “company tea” wanted her supper:  by a footpath through the churchyard, closely mown and planted with rosebushes:  and so into the church, where, after dropping a hurried professional curtsey to the altar, she set about her evening duties.  Isabel called herself the curate, but she did a good deal which is not expected of a curate, such as shutting windows and changing lesson-markers, propping up the trebles when they went astray in the pointing of the Psalms, altering the numbers on the hymn-board, writing out choir papers, putting flowers in the vases and candles in the benediction lights, playing the organ as required and occasionally blowing it. . . .  Before leaving the church she fell on her knees, in deference to Mr. Stafford and the text by the door, and said a prayer.  What did she pray?  “O Lord bless this church and all who worship in it and make father preach a good sermon next Sunday.  I wish I’d been playing with Val instead of Jack, we should have won that last set if Jack hadn’t muffed his services. . . .  Well, this curate was only nineteen.”

And then, coming out into the fading light, she locked the north door behind her and went off whistling like a blackbird, if a blackbird could whistle the alto of Calkin’s Magnificat in B flat. . . .  Five minutes climbing of the steep brown floor of the beechwood, and she was out on uplands in the dying fires of day.  It had been twilight in the valley, but here the wide plain was sunlit and the air was fresh and dry:  in the valley even the river-aspens were almost quiet, but here there was still a sough of wind coming and going, through the dry grass thick set with lemon thyme and lady’s slipper, or along the low garden wall where red valerian sprouted out of yellow stonecrop.