“Can you manage with two clergymen?” said Canon Wilton.

“I’ll try.  I don’t think they’ll frighten me, and I’ve been wishing to meet Mr. Robertson for a long time.”

“He’s a good man,” said Canon Wilton very simply.  But the statement as he made it was like an accolade.

Rosamund enjoyed her quiet evening with the Canon in the house with the high green gate, the elm trees and the gray gables.  As they talked, at first in the oak-paneled dining-room, later in the Canon’s library by a big wood fire, she was always pleasantly conscious of being enclosed, of being closely sheltered in the arms of the Precincts, which held also the mighty Cathedral with its cloisters, its subterranean passages, its ancient tombs, its mysterious courts, its staircases, its towers hidden in the night.  The ecclesiastical flavor which she tasted was pleasant to her palate.  She loved the nearness of those stones which had been pressed by the knees of pilgrims, of those walls between which so many prayers had been uttered, so many praises had been sung.  A cosiness of religion enwrapped her.  She had a delicious feeling of safety.  They could hear the chimes where they sat encompassed by a silence which was not like ordinary silences, but which to Rosamund seemed impregnated with the peace of long meditations and of communings with the unseen.

“This rests me,” she said to her host.  “Don’t you love your time here?”

“I’m fond of Welsley, but I don’t think I should like to pass all my year in it.  I don’t believe in sinking down into religion, or into practises connected with it, as a soft old man sinks down into a feather bed.  And that’s what some people do.”

“Do they?” said Rosamund abstractedly.

Just then a large and murmurous sound, apparently from very far off, had begun to steal upon her ears, level and deep, suggestive almost of the vast slumber of a world and of the underthings that are sleepless but keep at a distance.

“Is it the organ?” she asked, in a listening voice.

Canon Wilton nodded.

“Dickinson practising.”

They sat in silence for a long time listening.  In that silence the Canon was watching Rosamund.  He thought how beautiful she was and how good, but he almost disliked the joy which he discerned in her expression, in her complete repose.  He rebuked himself for this approach to dislike, but his rebuke was not efficacious.  In this enclosed calm of the precincts of Welsley where, pacing within the walls by the edge of the velvety lawns, the watchman would presently cry out the hour Canon Wilton was conscious of a life at a distance, the life of a man he had met first in St. James’s Square.  The beautiful woman in the chair by the fire had surely forgotten that man.

Presently the distant sound of the organ ceased.

“I love Welsley,” said Rosamund, on a little sigh.  “I just love it.  I should like to live in the Precincts.”