The morning after was bright and fair, so that sunlight mingled with the drowsy calm—­Sunday in the country as we remember it, looking lovingly back from lands that are not English to the tenderer side of the Puritan Sabbath.  But I missed my little aubade from the lawn, and not till breakfast-time did I behold my small friends, who then came into the breakfast-room, one on either side of their mother—­two miniature sailors, exquisitely neat but visibly dejected.  Behind walked Tip, demurely recognising the change in the atmosphere, but, undisturbed thereby, he at once, with his usual air of self-satisfied dignity, assumed his place in the largest arm-chair.

“The landau could take us all to church except you, George,” said Lady Atherley, looking thoughtfully into the fire as we waited for breakfast and the Canon.  “But I suppose you would prefer to walk?”

“Why should you suppose I am going to church, either walking or driving?”

“Well, I certainly hoped you would have gone to-day; as Uncle Augustus is going to preach it seems only polite to do so.”

“Well, I don’t mind; I daresay it will do me no harm; and if it is understood I attend only out of consideration for my wife’s uncle, then—­”

He was interrupted by the entrance of the person in question.

Many times during breakfast Denis looked thoughtfully at his great-uncle, and at last inquired—­

“Do you preach very long sermons, Uncle Augustus?”

“They are not generally considered so,” replied the Canon with some dignity.

“Denis, I have often told you not to ask questions,” said Lady Atherley.

“When I am grown up,” remarked Harold, “I will be an atheist.”

“Do you know what an atheist is?” inquired his father.

“Yes, it is people who never go to church.”

“But they go to lecture-rooms, which you would find worse.”

“But they don’t have sermons.”

“Don’t they?  Hours long, especially when they bury each other.”

“Oh!” said Harold, evidently taken aback, and somewhat reconciled to the church.

“When I am grown up,” said Denis, “I mean to be the same church as Aunt Cissy.”

“And what may that be?” inquired the Canon.

Denis was silent and looked perplexed; but some time afterwards, when we were talking of other things, he called out, with the joy of one who has captured that elusive thing, a definition: 

“In Aunt Cissy’s church they climb trees and make toffee on Sundays.”

After which Lady Atherley seemed glad to take them both away with her.

It was perhaps this remark that led the Canon to ask, on the way to church—­

“Is it true that Mrs. de Noel attends a dissenting chapel?”

“No,” said Lady Atherley.  “But I know why people say so.  She lent a field last year to the Methodists to have their camp-meeting in.”

“Oh! but that is a pity,” said the Canon.  “A very great pity—­a person in her position encouraging dissent, especially when there is no real occasion for it.  Clara’s nephew, young Littlemore, did something of the kind last year, but then he was standing for the county; and though that hardly justifies, it excuses, a little pandering to the multitude.”