Every one gathered there, every one talked to every one else before
parting, and the long spaces and silences and pauses of the day allowed
the comments and the questions and the surmises to grow and swell and
distend into gigantic images before night took every one and stretched
them upon their backs to dream.
What the Archdeacon liked was an "off" Sunday, when he had nothing to do
save to walk majestically into his place in the choir stall, to read,
perhaps, a Lesson, to talk gravely to people who came to have tea with him
after the Sunday Evensong, to reflect lazily, after Sunday supper, his
long legs stretched out in front of him, a pipe in his mouth, upon the
goodness and happiness and splendour of the Cathedral and the world and
his own place in it. Such a Sunday was a perfect thing--and such a Sunday
April 18 ought to have been...alas! it was not so.
It began very early, somewhere about seven in the morning, with a horrible
incident. The rule on Sundays was that the maid knocked at half-past six
on the door and gave the Archdeacon and his wife their tea.
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