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lambit Hydaspes,’

they concluded in galloping duet and stood in the ensuing silence regarding each other with genial enthusiasm.

‘But come, come,’ cried the rector. His eyes were pleasant. ‘Shall I let the stranger languish without my gates?’ The grilled iron swung open and his earthy hand was heavy on Jones’s shoulder. ‘Come let us try the spire.’

The grass was good. A myriad bees vacillated between clover and apple bloom, apple bloom and clover, and from the Gothic mass of the church the spire rose, a prayer imperishable in bronze, immaculate in its illusion of slow ruin across motionless young clouds.

‘My one sincere parishioner,’ murmured the divine. Sunlight was a windy golden plume about his bald head, and Januarius Jones’s face was a round mirror before which fauns and nymphs might have wantoned when the world was young.

‘Parishioner, did I say? It is more than that: it is by such as this that man may approach nearest to God. And how few will believe this! How few, how few!’ He stared unblinking into the sun-filled sky: drowned in his eyes was a despair long since grown cool and quiet.