And now by slow and beautiful degrees the cold and naked young year grew warm, and expanded from weeping, shivering infancy into the delighted consciousness of happy childhood.

The first snowdrops, the earliest aconites, perked up their pretty heads in Mary's cottage garden, and throughout all nature there came that inexplicable, indefinite, soft pulsation of new life and new love which we call the spring.

Tiny buds, rosy and shining with sap, began to gleam like rough jewels on every twig and tree--a colony of rooks which had abode in the elms surrounding Weircombe Church, started to make great ado about their housekeeping, and kept up as much jabber as though they were inaugurating an Irish night in the House of Commons,--and, over a more or less tranquil sea, the gulls poised lightly on the heaving waters in restful attitudes, as though conscious that the stress of winter was past.

To look at Weircombe village as it lay peacefully aslant down the rocky "coombe," no one would have thought it likely to be a scene of silent, but none the less violent, internal feud; yet such nevertheless was the case, and all the trouble had arisen since the first Sunday of the first month of the Reverend Mr.Arbroath's "taking duty" in the parish.

On that day six small choirboys had appeared in the Church, together with a tall lanky youth in a black gown and white surplice--and to the stupefied amazement of the congregation, the lanky youth had carried a gilt cross round the Church, followed by Arbroath himself and the six little boys, all chanting in a manner such as the Weircombe folk had never heard before.
It was a deeply resented innovation, especially as the six little boys and the lanky cross-bearer, as well as the cross itself, had been mysteriously "hired" from somewhere by Mr.Arbroath, and were altogether strange to the village.