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he never consciously heard more than a dozen words, he was vaguely grateful, because it gave him a chance to sit still and lose himself in a rich daydream compounded of the glowing colours of stainedglass, the holy smell of the stove in winter and of warm varnish in summer, and the rise and fall of the Vicar’s drawling voice, together with all manner of odd thoughts and random recollections, associated for the most part with other Sunday mornings. From the windows, especially, he never failed to derive enjoyment—an enjoyment sensuous in the main but not wholly so, for the pictures, too, interested him, and he was able bit by bit to piece together a strange world—a stained-glass-window world—in which dwelt the saints and the patriarchs and the persons of the Trinity, all perpetually re-enacting their several parts in the brightly coloured drama that these windows depicted. This world he identified with the heaven into which, if he learned his catechism and did not too often call his father a beast, he would some day be translated. I have said that outside his father’s study Egg gave no thought to books, being absorbed in the business of touching and tasting and intimately knowing the things of his own world. So, too, his dalliance with questions of religion was confined not merely within the limits of Sunday but within the time spent in the church itself. Religion, on its imaginative side, was for him a rather agreeable game, a many-coloured reverie to be resumed every week at the moment when the Vicar announced his text. One just slipped back into that other world, taking up the thread of fancy at the point where it had been unreluctantly dropped seven days ago, or indeed at any other point, for there were no rules in thisgame. Into this confused luminous dream there sometimes floated—to be instantly invested with a new exotic quality—fragmentary memories of his life outside, his real life; pictures appeared out of nowhere; and sonorous cadences—‘defend us in the same from all assaults of our enemies, that we, surely trusting in thy defence, may not fear the power of any adversary’—echoed like organ-music, rang like deep-toned bells, in his mind; for phrases from the very prayers that had been tedious to hear became rich and satisfying in recollection.
    In due time another element was introduced into the Sunday morning game by Miss Jinny Randall, at whom both Willy and Egg used to stare under cover of religious exercises: the one for reasons that may be plausibly surmised, the other by force of a perplexing example. Jinny, it seemed to Egg, was by no means a remarkable young woman. She was neat and small and not bad-looking; but, unless poor Willy accounted darkness a virtue, dark hair, dark eyes, a cream-tinted skin, she was no whit superior to our Sarah, who, as everybody knew, was not an exciting person. Moreover, in spite of her ladylike ways and her school-teaching, in spite of the villagers’ tribute, ‘She
do
talk well-off!’, everybody knew her to be the daughter of Randall’s General Store, and most people, including Willy himself, had received at her hands bags of flour, packets of pepper, tins of mustard, bundles of firewood, popcorn, bullseyes, reels of cotton, canvas shoes, egg-cups, mop-heads,string bags, pairs of braces, and other articles of domestic consumption. But three years ago she had been snatched up and educated by a rich relation, and was now come back, a real young lady, to teach pothooks and hangers and catechism to such of the village children as could be persuaded to listen to her. And yet, if one had only to look at Jinny Randall to see that she would never be a romantic figure, one had only, when she was near, to look at Willy Pandervil to know that for him she was romance itself. Her power over him was a phenomenon not to be ignored. Egg discovered it almost as soon as did the victim himself, and a day or two sooner than