the singing began.

* * * * *

It was a perfectly still night, frost-bound and motionless. It was late
enough for the sounds of the town to have died away (cathedral towns go
to bed early and rise late), and, indeed, almost the only sounds they
had heard, even three or four hours before, had been the occasional
deliberate chime of bells, like a meditative man suddenly uttering a
word or two aloud. Now, however, everything was dead silent. Probably
the hour had struck immediately before they awoke, since Frank remarks
that it seemed a long time before four notes tolled out the quarter.

The singing came first as a sensation rather than as a sound, so far
away was it. It was not at once that Frank formulated the sense of
pleasure that he experienced by telling himself that someone was
singing.

At first it was a single voice that made itself heard--a tenor of
extraordinary clarity. The air was unknown to him, but it had the
character of antiquity; there was a certain pleasant melancholy about
it; it contained little trills and grace-notes, such as--before harmony
developed in the modern sense--probably supplied the absence of chords.
There was no wind on which the sound could rise or fall, and it grew
from a thread out of the distance into clear singing not a quarter of a
mile away....

The Major presently grunted over his pipe some expression of surprise;
but Frank could say nothing. He was almost holding his breath, so great
was his pleasure.

The air, almost regretfully, ran downhill like a brook approaching, an
inevitable full close; and then, as the last note was reached, a chord
of voices broke in with some kind of chorus.

The voices were of a quartette of men, and rang together like struck
notes, not loud or harsh, but, on the contrary, with a restrained
softness that must, I suppose, have been the result of very careful
training. It was the same air that they were repeating, but the
grace-notes were absent, and the four voices, in chord after chord,
supplied their place by harmony. It was impossible to tell what was the
subject of the song or even whether it were sacred or secular, for it
was of that period--at least, so I conjecture--when the two worlds were
one, and when men courted their love and adored their God after the same
fashion. Only there ran through all that air of sweet and austere
melancholy, as if earthly music could do no more than hint at what the
heart wi