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Every lad at his age wants to eat up the world." Parson Jack could remember no such ambition. They passed into the church together. Now the surprise which awaits you in Langona Church is its chancel, which stands high above the level of the nave, and, rising suddenly beneath a fine Early English arch, carries the eye upward to the altar with a strange illusion of distance.
"I won't disgust you with thanks, and there are no excuses." He picked up his hat and turned to go. "Well, but look here; don't be in a hurry. What about your prospects? They're none too healthy, I'm afraid. Still, if a few pounds could give you a fresh start somewhere " "I have no prospects, but for the moment I wasn't thinking of myself. I was thinking of Langona and the old church."
Nevertheless he gave it up at once, packed his few belongings, and hired a bedroom at the Widow Copping's. It appeared that he, too, needed time to look about him. And so he loitered about Langona until the architect's plans were received, discussed, approved, and submitted to tender. A Bristol builder secured the contract.
Sir Harry's face fell. He hated disagreeable business. He flipped a piece of biscuit at his spaniel's nose and sat back, crossing his legs. "Won't it keep?" "To me it's important." "Oh, fire away then: only help yourself to the claret first." "A girl Lizzie Pezzack, living over at Langona has had a child born " "Stop a moment. Do I know her?
You know the kind of haze that gets up sometimes on hot days, when the sun's drawing water? They say that if you're a mile or two out and this happens between you and Langona Creek, you can see the city quite plain above the shore, with the seven churches and all." "I can see it!" Taffy blurted this out almost without knowing that he spoke; and blushed furiously when George laughed.
He suspected that Sir Harry chafed a little in a careless way at his continuing to hold the living, and would be glad to see him replaced by an incumbent with private means and no failings to be apologised for with a shrug of the shoulders. And this knowledge was perhaps the worst of his shame. Yet what could he do? since to surrender Langona was to starve.
For the moment, however, he was almost penniless; and he had answered in vain some dozen advertisements of curacies, when a college friend came to the rescue and prevailed on a distant kinsman to offer him the living of Langona, with a net annual stipend of 51 pounds eighteen shillings and sixpence. There are such "livings." It was offered, of course, and accepted, merely as a stopgap.
And they both had been rebuilt together on the call of Edmund Stafford, Bishop of Exeter in the August of that year. He read on, the familiar at each step opening new bypaths into the unguessed. But the delight of delights was to hug, while he read, his purpose to change all this story of ruin, to give it a new and happier chapter, to stand out eminent among the forgotten Vicars of Langona. . . .
A fine city lies there, covered with the sands; and this was what happened. The King of Langona had a son, a handsome young Prince, who lived at home until he was eighteen, and then went on his travels. That was the custom, you know. The Prince took only his foster-brother, whose name was John, and they travelled for three years.
On their way back, as they came to Langona Creek, they saw the convicts at work, and in one of the fields was a girl digging alone. She had a ring round her ankle, like the rest, with a chain and iron weight, but she was the most beautiful girl the Prince had ever seen. So he pulled up his horse and asked her who she was, and how she came to be wearing the chain.
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