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erham scholarships at one of the colleges at Cambridge. Those who failed, either had to pay like the ordinary schoolboys, or left the school.
Dear Mrs. Harewood was a perfect Malaprop, and puzzled Geraldine by continually calling the present occasion the rural meeting, and other like slips, uncommonly comical in a well-educated woman with the words she knew best.
All this, and a great deal more--about the shy woman-hating organist, and the unluckiness of the dissenter--no, precentor--having a sick wife, and the legal difficulties that prevented building a better house for the boarders than the queer long room where they lodged, between the cloister and the Bailey--the proper name of the little court by which Geraldine had come--was poured out; and kind as it was, there was a certain sense of having been talked to death.
A whole flood of Harewoods, Underwoods, and untold numbers besides, swept into the room as the bell began to ring for Evensong. Most sincere were Cherry's entreaties that she might be left alone. She could not go back to her coign of vantage, 'it had been too beautiful for her to bear more,' she said; and she severally declined offers of companionship from three female Harewoods and two sisters, telling Wilmet at last that all she wanted was to be still and alone.
Alone she was, but not still, for there was nothing to hinder the magnificent volume of sound that surged around the Cathedral from coming to her; and she could trace the service all along--in chant, pealing mighty Amens, with the hush between, in anthem, and in jubilant hymn. She was more calmly happy than in the oppressive grandeur of the morning, as she lay there, in the cool drawing-room, with the open window veiled by loose sprays of untrimmed roses, and sacred prints looking down from the walls.
The solitude lasted rather too long, when she had heard the hum and buzz of the host pouring out of the Cathedral, and still no one came. They were to go home by the 5.10 train, and every time she cou