The Major smoked steadily.
Then the singing began.
* * * * * It was a perfectly still night, frost-bound and motionless.

It was late enough for the sounds of the town to have died away (cathedral towns go to bed early and rise late), and, indeed, almost the only sounds they had heard, even three or four hours before, had been the occasional deliberate chime of bells, like a meditative man suddenly uttering a word or two aloud.

Now, however, everything was dead silent.

Probably the hour had struck immediately before they awoke, since Frank remarks that it seemed a long time before four notes tolled out the quarter.
The singing came first as a sensation rather than as a sound, so far away was it.

It was not at once that Frank formulated the sense of pleasure that he experienced by telling himself that someone was singing.
At first it was a single voice that made itself heard--a tenor of extraordinary clarity.