Through a plain glass window high up in the right-hand aisle the sun shot a gleam athwart the Pendyces’ pew.  It found its last resting-place on Mrs. Barter’s face, showing her soft crumpled cheeks painfully flushed, the lines on her forehead, and those shining eyes, eager and anxious, travelling ever from her husband to her music and back again.  At the least fold or frown on his face the music seemed to quiver, as to some spasm in the player’s soul.  In the Pendyces’ pew the two girls sang loudly and with a certain sweetness.  Mr. Pendyce, too, sang, and once or twice he looked in surprise at his brother, as though he were not making a creditable noise.

Mrs. Pendyce did not sing, but her lips moved, and her eyes followed the millions of little dust atoms dancing in the long slanting sunbeam.  Its gold path canted slowly from her, then, as by magic, vanished.  Mrs. Pendyce let her eyes fall.  Something had fled from her soul with the sunbeam; her lips moved no more.

The Squire sang two loud notes, spoke three, sang two again; the Psalms ceased.  He left his seat, and placing his hands on the lectern’s sides, leaned forward and began to read the Lesson.  He read the story of Abraham and Lot, and of their flocks and herds, and how they could not dwell together, and as he read, hypnotised by the sound of his own voice, he was thinking: 

’This Lesson is well read by me, Horace Pendyce.  I am Horace Pendyce—­Horace Pendyce.  Amen, Horace Pendyce!’

And in the first pew on the left Mrs. Pendyce fixed her eyes upon him, for this was her habit, and she thought how, when the spring came again, she would run up to town, alone, and stay at Green’s Hotel, where she had always stayed with her father when a girl.  George had promised to look after her, and take her round the theatres.  And forgetting that she had thought this every autumn for the last ten years, she gently smiled and nodded.  Mr. Pendyce said: 

“’And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth; so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered.  Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.  Then Abram removed his tent, and came and dwelt in the plain of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built there an altar unto the Lord.’  Here endeth the first Lesson.”

The sun, reaching the second window, again shot a gold pathway athwart the church; again the millions of dust atoms danced, and the service went on.

There came a hush.  The spaniel John, crouched close to the ground outside, poked his long black nose under the churchyard gate; the fox-terriers, seated patient in the grass, pricked their ears.  A voice speaking on one note broke the hush.  The spaniel John sighed, the fox-terriers dropped their ears, and lay down heavily against each other.  The Rector had begun to preach.  He preached on fruitfulness, and in the first right-hand pew six of his children at once began to fidget.  Mrs. Barter, sideways and unsupported on her seat, kept her starry eyes fixed on his cheek; a line of perplexity furrowed her brow.  Now and again she moved as though her back ached.  The Rector quartered his congregation with his gaze, lest any amongst them should incline to sleep.  He spoke in a loud-sounding voice.