"Come along, Miss Eden," he said in a low clear tone; "You are quite at liberty to practise as usual. Sir Morton Pippitt and his friends will not disturb you."
Miss Eden smiled sedately and bent her head, passing by the visitors with an easy demeanour and assured step, and made her way to where the organ, small, but sweet and powerful, occupied a corner near the chancel. While she busied herself in opening the instrument and arranging her musics Walden took advantage of the diversion created by her entrance to address himself to the knight Pippitt.
"If I can be of service to your friends in explaining anything about the church they may wish, to know, pray command me, Sir Morton," he said. "But I presume that you and Mr, Leveson"--here he glanced at the portly 'Putty' with a slight smile--"have pointed out all that is necessary."
"On the contrary!" said Mr. Marius Longford 'of the Savile and Savage,' with a smoothly tolerant air; "We are really quite in the dark! Do we understand, for example, that the restoration of this church is entirely due to your generosity, or to assistance from public funds and subscriptions?"
"The restoration is due, not to my 'generosity,'" replied Walden, "but merely to my sense of what is fitting for Divine service. I have had no assistance from any fund or from any individual, because I have not sought it."
There was a pause, during which Mr. Longford fixed a pair of gold- rimmed glasses on his nose and gazed quizzically through them at Sir Morton Pippitt, whose countenance had grown uncomfortably purple in hue either with exterior heat or inward vexation.
"I thought. Sir Morton," he began slowly, when Mr. Leveson adroitly interrupted him by the query: "Now what period would you fix, Mr. Longford, for this sarcophagus? I am myself inclined to think it of the fourteenth century."
A soft low strain of music here crept through, the church,--the village schoolmistress was beginning her practice. She had a delicate touch, and the sounds her fingers pressed from the organ- keys were full, and solemn and sweet. His Grace the Duke of Lumpton coughed loudly; he hated music, and always made some animal noise of his own to drown it.
"What matters the period!" murmured Julian Adderley, running his thin hand through his thick hair. "Is it not sufficient to see it here among us, with us, OF us?"
"God bless my soul! I hope it is not OF us!" spluttered Sir Morton with a kind of fat chuckle which seemed to emanate from his stiff collar rather than from his throat; "'Ashes to ashes' of course; we are all aware of that--but not just yet!--not just yet!"