The Alteration

       'It was there when we came. My father says New Englanders are living here since over a hundred years. The first was a man called Jefferson Davis.'

       'Oh, yes,' said Hubert sagely, and added with as much conviction as he could muster, 'This is a very pretty garden.'

       'Thank you. Did the folk enjoy your singing just then?'

       'I think so. Everybody was polite.'

       In silence, the boy and girl crossed the circular space, which had nothing at its centre, and left it on the further side through a gap in the hedge. They were not the only two in the garden, but nobody else was near. Abruptly, and in a flat tone, Hilda said, 'I didn't hear it.'

       'Forgive me?'

       'I didn't hear your singing. Well, I heard it in the distance, but I didn't listen to it. One of the little children was unhappy, so I carried him out here and talked to him and told him stories and gave him flowers.'

       They had reached what amounted to a small wood, mainly of young trees. One of them had suffered some minor malformation during growth such that, a yard or so from the ground, its trunk leaned over at almost forty-five degrees for another yard before resuming the vertical. Hilda went over to it, joined her hands round the inclined part and hung back at the length of her arms, looking up through the branches.

       'That was kind of you,' said Hubert. 'To look after the little child.'

       'It was nothing.' She began rhythmically pulling her body up so as to touch the trunk with her chest, then lowering herself again. 'Are you disappointed that I didn't listen to your singing?'

       'Yes.'

       'Why?'

       'Why? Surely you can see why. Singing is what I do best. If you had listened to me, you might have begun to admire me, and after that you might have begun to like me.'

       Without stopping her exercise, Hilda brought her head down and looked at him. He felt in himself a kind of tension he had not known before; it was touched with bewilderment and a vague but powerful longing. As abruptly as a moment earlier, but in a different voice, she said, 'Copann a me, thart a precious honest cooly, hoke. Kisah-kihitin.'

       'What? What do you say?'

       'That's how the people talk in New. England. See, I haven't forgotten.'

       'But when I asked you before... What does it mean?'

       'That you're honest.'

       'Thank you, but I understood that-it was all I did understand. But you said more than that. What was that last word? Was it a word?'

       'It was Indian. Now don't ask more.' She released the tree-trunk and stood facing him a yard away or less. 'You don't look like a little man. That was trash. You simply look more than ten years.'

       Hubert felt a tingling at the back of his neck. Although neither of them made any move, he was always to say to himself afterwards that they would have kissed then if no one had come along. But someone did: Louis in his frilled shirt and chequered stockings, smiling, swinging his arms.

       'So you hide in the woods,' he said amiably. 'Come back to the festa, Hilda. There's to be a game of Old Mother Broomstick.'

       'Oh, that I mustn't miss.'

       She started for the house with Louis at her side and Hubert following.

       Father Matthew Lyall struck a phosphorus and lit the gas-lamp in his room above the express-house. At first sight it was very much a priest's room: small, low-ceilinged, barely furnished, containing indeed only a bed, a chair, a writing-table, a press and a chest-of-drawers in unvarnished wood, a prie-dieu and some hundreds of books. The walls, done over with a dark wash, were bare except for the legally-required crucifix and pious picture—in this case a Virgin and Child identical with millions to be seen throughout Christendom in the habitations of the people. The bed was somewhat larger than one person might have been expected to have a use for, but Father Lyall was a restless sleeper and needed the extra space, or so he would say. The chair was unusually comfortable, but that was no more than the due of a man given to meditation. It was far less obvious that the books, except for a few dozen in unlettered bindings, never left their places on the shelves, and not obvious at all that the press hid several suits of decidedly secular clothing, a couple of bottles of old geneva, and a store of preventative sheaths.

       Lyall screwed up his eyes and yawned: it was late, past ten o'clock, and supper had not been an easy occasion. That morning, Dame Anvil had responded with a violent display of passion to the news, delivered jointly by her husband and Lyall, that the alteration of her younger son was proposed. At table, Master Anvil had addressed her only on indifferent matters, and so she had had to keep her emotions to herself, or rather had not spoken of them: she had made them plain enough in other ways. Lyall took her behaviour for little more than a piece of feminine self-assertion, and it would certainly be useful to him if he were to decide to carry further his obstruction of Abbot Thynne's wishes; at the same time, it had done nothing to improve his relations with Anvil, who had made it equally plain that he saw Lyall as the instrument, if not the instigator, of the lady's capriccios.

       But (the priest told himself) he must not be uncharitable towards somebody who suffered: if Dame Anvil really felt one-tenth of what she professed to feel, she was to be pitied. He would pray for her mind to be eased, not an altogether straightforward task. Praying for her had recently become apt to turn without apparent transition into thinking about her, thinking thoughts too that ill suited the occasion.

       He had taken off his gown and was just unfastening his collar when he heard quiet footsteps on the steep right-angled stairway that ran up from the corner of the express-house. There was a tap at his door.

       'Who is it?'

       'Dame Anvil. May I come in?'

       Discretion pointed two opposite ways: for her to be in his room at night was bad enough in itself, but what might she not do if refused entry in her present state? Inclination settled the matter.

       'Of course,' he said.

       Carrying a bare candle, she stood on the threshold as if there was nothing left of whatever impulse had brought her so far. The priest hurried over, shut the door behind her and took and blew out the candle.

       'Dame, this is most unwise. What if you were discovered here?'

       She smiled, showing her fine teeth. 'You're my spiritual guide, Father.'

       'Much heed your husband would pay to that.'

       'My husband has gone to the gaming-rooms down Tyburn Lane. He won't be back before midnight.'

       'The express is below.'

       'He walked. And nobody in the house knows where I am.'

       'What do you want with me? Can't it wait till the morning?'

       'Come now, Father, you know what I want with you, and if it could wait I should have let it.'

       'Very well. My excuses, dame, but you startled me a little. Please sit down. And try to be calm.'

       'I am calm. I haven't come here to say all over again what I said this morning. I've come to ask you about something I didn't know then. When my husband told me that he and all the men at St Cecilia's, that everyone concerned had agreed on this thing, you were silent. And you were silent when I called it a barbarity and an abomination and fit only for Turks and whatever else I called it. But I've since learned that you had already refused to sign the document authorising it.'

       'Your husband and I had differed on the matter earlier. It would have been improper for me to continue the argument in your presence.'

       'I understand that, Father. It wasn't what I meant to ask you about. There was something to the effect that you had some days to decide finally whether or not to give your consent. You will of course persist in withholding it?'