the words "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the
Lord." Lack of opportunity had kept him from attending in the first
case, and, after a while, having lost the habit of his boyhood, he had
ceased to think of taking such opportunities as did offer.

"I think it must be five years at least since I went to anything but a
funeral service," he remarked to May, as they walked towards the big
red-brick church.

Mrs. Marlow threw a swift glance over her shoulder, fearing her other
guests, who were following, might have heard. "Hush, Jimmy," she said.
"It sounds so bad. Never say that again, especially before the servants.
The rector's housemaid is sister to my parlour-maid, and it would be
sure to get round to him. Of course, I know you have been in wild places
where there were no churches, and we understand, but others might not.
And all our friends are Church-people."

Jimmy dropped the subject, and a few minutes later he was following her
rustling skirts up the broad centre aisle to the pew four rows back from
the pulpit. He wished it had not been so far forward, because the
worshippers interested him, if only by reason of their sameness of type.
You could see they were all people of position, with regular incomes and
hereditary political convictions, solid people of that slow-moving,
tenacious class which is the real backbone of the country, holding, as
it does, the greater part of the wealth, and producing, often by a kind
of apparent accident, the greater part of the intellect.

Jimmy belonged to them by birth, and yet, as he sat amongst them,
listening to the lisping voice of the senior curate, he found it hard to
realise the fact. He tried his best to follow the service, to keep his
mind on it, but, somehow, the whole atmosphere seemed wrong. The church
was a modern one, the work of a famous architect, and, therefore,
grossly inartistic, lacking every feature which makes for solemnity and
beauty. The detail was coarse and roughly finished, the red-brick walls,
as always, an offence to the eye; big texts seemed to squirm, like
semi-paralysed eels, over the chancel arch and round the East window.
The latter, off which Jimmy could hardly take his eyes, was a veritable
triumph of the Victorian tradition. Its colouring was gruesome, its
design grotesque; and yet it was a source of great pride to the
congregation as a whole, having been put in to the memory of a banker
who had left nearly a million. They no more dre