shed to express.

* * * * *

Frank listened in a sort of ecstasy. The music was nearer now, coming
from the direction from which the three travelers had themselves come
this afternoon. Presently, from the apparent diminuendo, it was plain
that the singers were past, and were going on towards the town. There
was no sound of footsteps; the Major remarked on that, when he could
get Frank to attend a few minutes later, when all was over; but there
were field paths running in every direction, as well as broad stretches
of grass beside the road, so the singers may very well have been walking
on soft ground. (These points are dispassionately noted down in the
diary.)

The chorus was growing fainter now; once more the last slopes of the
melody were in sight--those downhill gradations of the air that told of
the silence to come. Then once more, for an instant, there was silence,
till again, perhaps nearly a quarter of a mile away, the single tenor
voice began _da capo_. And the last that Frank heard, at the moment
before the quarter struck and, soft and mellow though it was, jarred the
air and left the ear unable to focus itself again on the tiny woven
thread of sound, was, once more the untiring quartette taking up the
melody, far off in the silent darkness.

It seems to me a curious little incident--this passing of four singers
in the night; it might have seemed as if our travelers, by a kind of
chance, were allowed to overhear the affairs of a world other than their
own--and the more curious because Frank seems to have been so much
absorbed by it. Of course, from a practical point of view, it is almost
painfully obvious what is the explanation. It must have been a quartette
from the cathedral choir, returning from some festivity in the suburbs;
and it must have happened that they followed the same route, though
walking on the grass, along which Frank himself had come that evening.

(II)

The second incident is even more ordinary, and once again I must declare
that nothing would have induced me to incorporate it into this story had
it not appeared, described very minutely in the sort of log-book into
which Frank's diary occasionally degenerates.

They were within a very few miles of the outskirts of London, and
December had succeeded November. They had had a day or two of work upon
some farm or other. (I have not been able to identify the place), and
had run into, and, indeed, exchanged