They were talking about improvements and additions which Trenholme hoped to get made to the college buildings in the course of a few years.  The future of the college was a subject in which he could always become absorbed, and it was one sufficiently identified with the best interests of the country to secure the attention of his listener.  In this land, where no church is established, there is so little bitterness existing between different religious bodies, that the fact that the college was under Episcopal management made no difference to the Presbyterian’s goodwill towards it.  He sent his own boys to school there, admired Trenholme’s enthusiastic devotion to his work, and believed as firmly as the Principal himself that the school would become a great university.  It was important to Trenholme that this man—­that any man of influence, should believe in him, in his college, and in the great future of both.  The prosperity of his work depended so greatly upon the good opinion of all, that he had grown into the habit of considering hours well spent that, like this one, were given to bringing another into sympathy with himself in the matter of the next projected improvement.  It was thus that he had advanced his work step by step since he came to Chellaston; if the method sometimes struck his inner self as a little sordid, the work was still a noble one, and the method necessary to the quick enlargement he desired.  Both men were in full tide of talk upon the necessity for a new gymnasium, its probable cost, and the best means of raising the money, when they walked out of the pine shade into an open stretch of the road.

Soft, mountainous clouds of snowy whiteness were winging their way across the brilliant blue of the sky.  The brightness of the light had wiped all warm colour from the landscape.  The airy shadows of the clouds coursed over a scene in which the yellow of ripened fields, the green of the woods on Chellaston Mountain, and the blue of the distance, were only brought to the eye in the pale, cool tones of high light.  The road and the river ran together now as far as might be seen, the one almost pure white in its inch-deep dust, the other tumbling rapidly, a dancing mirror for the light.

The talkers went on, unmindful of dust and heat.  Then a cloud came between them and the sun, changing the hue of all things for the moment.  This lured them further.  The oat harvest was ready.  The reaping machines were already in the fields far and near, making noise like that of some new enormous insect of rattling throat.  From roadside trees the cicada vied with them, making the welkin ring.