
    Among these on-lookers were three young men of a superior class, carrying
small knapsacks strapped to their shoulders, and stout sticks in their hands.
Their general likeness to each other, and their consecutive ages, would almost
have suggested that they might be, what in fact they were, brothers. The eldest
wore the white tie, high waistcoat, and thin-brimmed hat of the regulation
curate; the second was the normal undergraduate; the appearance of the third and
youngest would hardly have been sufficient to characterize him; there was an
uncribbed, uncabined aspect in his eyes and attire, implying that he had hardly
as yet found the entrance to his professional groove. That he was a desultory
tentative student of something and everything might only have been predicted of
him.
    These three brethren told casual acquaintance that they were spending their
Whitsun holidays in a walking tour through the Vale of Blackmoor, their course
being south-westerly from the town of Shaston on the north-east.
    They leant over the gate by the highway, and inquired as to the meaning of
the dance and the white-frocked maids. The two elder of the brothers were
plainly not intending to linger more than a moment, but the spectacle of a bevy
of girls dancing without male partners seemed to amuse the third, and make him
in no hurry to move on. He unstrapped his knapsack, put it, with his stick, on
the hedge-bank, and opened the gate.
    »What are you going to do, Angel?« asked the eldest.
    »I am inclined to go and have a fling with them.
    Why not all of us - just for a minute or two - it will not detain us long?«
    »No - no; nonsense!« said the first. »Dancing in public with a troop of
country hoydens - suppose we should be seen! Come along, or it will be dark
before we get to Stourcastle, and there's no place we can sleep at nearer than
that; besides, we must get through another chapter of A Counterblast to
Agnosticism before we turn in, now I have taken the trouble to bring the book.«
    »All right - I'll overtake you and Cuthbert in five minutes; don't stop; I
give my word that I will, Felix.«
    The two elder reluctantly left him and walked on, taking their brother's
knapsack to relieve him in following, and the youngest entered the field.
    »This is a thousand pities,« he said gallantly, to two or three of the girls
nearest him, as
