TheCompleteMemoirsOfGeorgeSherston

tion. I thought of the world outside, and the com-
parison made life out there seem queer and unreal.
I felt as if we were all on our way to next week in a
ship. But who was I, and what on earth had I been
doing? My very name suddenly seemed as though it
scarcely belonged to me. Stephen was sitting there
beside me, anyhow; there was no doubt about his
identity, and I thought what a nice face he had,
gentle and humorous and alight with natural intel-
ligence. I looked from him to his father who had been
in the background, so far, since the curate had been
reading the service (in an unemphatic businesslike
voice). But the Rector's eye met mine, which shied
guiltily away, and my wool-gathering was interrupted.
Even so might his gaze have alighted on one of the
coughing village children at the back of the church.

My sense of unfamiliarity with what was going on
was renewed when Colonel Hesmon's wizened face
and bushy grey eyebrows appeared above the shiny
brass eagle to read the First Lesson. This was not
quite the same Colonel who had been in such a frenzy
of excitement over the point-to-point race eight
months ago, when he had exclaimed, over and over
again, "I've told the boy that if he wins /'// give him
the horsel"

The Colonel's voice was on church parade now,
and he was every inch a churchwarden as wclL He
went through the lesson with dispassionate distinct-
ness and extreme rapidity. Since it was a long
passage from Isaiah, he went, as he would have said,
"a rattling good gallop". But the words, I thought,
were incongruous ones when uttered by the Colonel.
"And he will lift up an ensign to the nations from
afar, and will hiss unto themfrom the end of the earth:
and, behold, they shall come with speed swiftly: none

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