way on Wandsworth Plain.

Thus, if it had done nothing else to him, the Service for Men could be
held responsible for throwing that meeting with Violet much too late.

Still, he had no misgivings. It was June; and in June nine o'clock was
still daytime. And when he went to the Service he hadn't any idea what
it would do to him.

No more, of course, had poor old Wauchope. Wauchope was grateful and
apologetic; before they got there he said he didn't know what he might
be letting Ransome in for. The curate johnnie was bossing the Service,
but he understood they'd engaged another joker for the Address. What he,
Wauchope, funked, personally, more than anything was the Address. And
Ransome, generously, declared that whatever it was like, he'd stick it.
He'd stand by Wauchope to the finish, like a man.

* * * * *

They left their bicycles in Wauchope's rooms, and walked the few hundred
yards to St. Matthias's Mission Church.

St. Matthias's Mission Church was a brand-new yellow-brick building in
the latest Gothic, with a red-tiled roof, where a shrill little bell
swung tinkling under the arch in the high west gable.

Inside, cream distempered walls with brown stencilings; in the roof,
bare beams of pitch pine, stained and varnished; north and south, clear
glass windows shedding a greenish light; one brilliant stained-glass
window above the altar at the east end.

Up and down the aisles between the open pews of pitch pine went the
workers of the Mission, marshaling the men into their seats. By the west
door, Wauchope's friend, the cumbrous curate, who fancied himself as a
featherweight, stood smiling and shaking hands with each man as he came,
and thanking him for coming, thus carrying out the idea that it was an
entertainment. He had his largest smile, his closest grip for Wauchope
and for Ransome, for they were men after his own heart. Ransome observed
the curate critically, and without committing himself irretrievably to
an opinion, he owned that he looked fit enough. There was not about him
any sign that you could see of flabbiness or weediness. He was evidently
a decent johnnie, and for all that happened afterward Ransome forbore to
hold him personally responsible.

The service, conducted by the curate, was extremely brief. Everything
was left out that could be left, to make room for hymns wherever it was
possible to place a hymn. The Psalms were chanted, and the curate
intoned the