djustment of his tie, the brushing of his tall hat,
the drawing on of the dogskin gloves he wore in his office. It was not
easy for Mr. Ransome to exceed the professional dignity of his frock
coat and gray trousers, and yet every Sunday, by some miracle, he did
exceed it. Each minute irreproachable detail of his dress accentuated,
reiterated, the suggestion of his perpetual sobriety.

Still, there remained the memory of last night. Mrs. Ransome did not
evade it; on the contrary, she used it to demonstrate the indomitable
power of Mr. Ransome's will.

"_I_ say he ought to be layin' down," she said. "But there--He won't.
You know what He is since He's been sidesman. It's my belief He'd rise
up off his deathbed to hand that plate. It's his duty to go, and go He
will if He drops. That's your father all over."

"That's Him," Ranny assented.

His mother looked him in the face. It was the look, familiar to Ranny on
a Sunday morning, that, while it reinstated Ranny's father in his
rectitude, contrived subtly, insidiously, to put Ranny in the wrong.

"You're going, too," his mother said.

Well, no, he wasn't exactly going. Not, that was to say, to any church
in Wandsworth. (He had, in fact, a pressing engagement to meet young
Tyser at the first easterly signpost on Putney Common, and cycle with
him to Richmond.)

"It's only a spin," said Ranny, though the look on his mother's face was
enough to tell him that a spin, on a Sunday, was dissipation, and he,
recklessly, iniquitously spinning, a prodigal most unsuitably descended
from an upright father.

And then (this happened nearly every Sunday) Ranny set himself to charm
away that look from his mother's face. First of all he said she was a
tip-topper, a howling swell, and asked her where _she_ expected to go to
in that hat, nippin' in and cuttin' all the girls out, and she a married
woman and a mother; and whether it wouldn't be fairer all around, and
much more proper, if she was to wear something in the nature of a veil?
Then he buttoned up her gloves over her little fat wrists and kissed her
in several places where the veil ought to have been; and when he had
informed her that "the Humming-bird was a regular toff," and had
dismissed them both with his blessing, standing on the doorstep of the
shop, he wheeled his bicycle out into the street, mounted it, and
followed at the pace of a walking funeral until his parents had
disappeared into the Parish Church.

Then Ranny,