as little Dickie's bright readiness in always handing
whatever was wanting.

The work was pretty well over, when Aubrey, who had just arrived with
leave for a week, came down, and made it desultory. Dickie, whose
imagination had been a good deal occupied by his soldier uncle, wanted
to study him, and Gertrude was never steady when Aubrey was near.
Presently it was discovered that the door to the tower stair was open.
The ascent of the tower was a feat performed two or three times in a
lifetime at Stoneborough. Harry had once beguiled Ethel and Mary up,
but Gertrude had never gone, and was crazy to go, as was likewise
Dickie. Moreover, Aubrey and Gertrude insisted that it was only proper
that Ethel should pay her respects to her prototype the gurgoyle, they
wanted to compare her with him, and ordered her up; in fact their
spirits were too high for them to be at ease within the church, and
Ethel, maugre her thirty years, partook of the exhilaration enough to
delight in an extraordinary enterprise, and as nothing remained but a
little sweeping up, they left this to the superintendence of Mary and
Mr. Wilmot, and embarked upon the narrow crumbling steps of the spiral
stair, that led up within an unnatural thickening of one of the great
piers that supported the tower, at the intersection of nave and
transepts. After a long period of dust and darkness, and the monotony
of always going with the same leg foremost, came a narrow door, leading
to the ringers' region, with all their ropes hanging down. Ethel was
thankful when she had got her youngsters past without an essay on them;
she doubted if she should have succeeded, but for Leonard's being an
element of soberness. Other little doors ensued, leading out to the
various elevations of roof, which were at all sorts of different
heights, the chancel lower than the nave, and one transept than the
other; besides that the nave had both triforium and clerestory. It was
a sort of labyrinth, and they wondered whether any one, except perhaps
the plumber's foreman knew his way among all the doors. Then there was
one leading inwards to the eight bells--from whose fascinations Ethel
thought Dickie never would be taken away--and still more charming, to
the clock, which clanged a tremendous three, as they were in the act of
looking at it, causing Leonard to make a great start, and then colour
painfully. It was hard to believe, as Daisy said, that the old tower,
that looked so short