Page:Solo (1924).pdf/17

 looked forward to that moment as the culminating point of the service, indeed of the whole week, for it gave them an opportunity of being conspicuous. This he guessed with an intuition sharpened by rivalry, for he himself looked forward to the same moment, for the same reason.

And he had an artist's horror of the noise made by pennies and dimes when the whole attention of the congregation should be focussed on the music with which he so fervently filled the interval. They chinked loudest of all when one reached the part that called for a hushed, "Æolian harp" effect. If he stopped to chide himself for an illicit desire to be conspicuous in the consciousness of Phœbe and Gritty and Walter—chiefly Phœbe, whose image was always before him during the tedious weekday hours of practice—he quickly came to his own defence with the reflection that, after all, he, a boy of eleven, perched on that bench, stretching down to pedals which had to be built up with pieces of board—he was obviously more important than four old men in shiny coats. Anybody could be an usher!

Those petty coins! He knew a naughty rhyme about them. Walter Dreer had whispered it to him in Sunday-school:

At dinner, in the kitchen of the big cold house, Paul hesitated to tell Aunt Verona of the contretemps during the offertory. Much as he venerated Aunt Verona,