Tom swung along the dim road, where the shadows ran before him. The new-risen moon looked over the [58] hedge, an amber disc just past the full, swimming against the wind from Satanstown. In the heart of the wind seemed still to beat the pulse of those far-off guns, the ghost of their day-long thunder. Over and over in his mind Tom turned his new thought—that he was going to fight for Worge.

In a quarter of an hour he had come to Sunday Street. He could see the moonlight lying like frost on the southward slope of the roofs, and the windows of the Bethel were ghostly with it, as they stared away to the marshes. The Bethel alone seemed awake in the little huddle of sleeping cottages—it had a strange look of watchfulness and waiting, its gaunt Georgian windows never had that comfortable blinking air of the cottage lattices.... Tom did not like the Bethel at night.

He looked across the road to the Horselunges, where Mr. Sumption lived. A crack of light showed under the blind of the minister’s room, and Tom’s heart gave a little thump of self-reproach, for he had not till then thought of saying good-bye to him. He had not seen much of Mr. Sumption lately, and had been too much absorbed in his own concerns to think of him, but now he made up his mind to call and say good-bye; it was past ten o’clock and he was very tired and sleepy, nevertheless he walked up to the door of the Horselunges and knocked.

Mrs. Hubble was in bed, as the hour demanded, so the door was opened by her lodger.

“Hello, Tom. Anything the matter? Do they want me at Worge?”

Mr. Sumption was always childishly eager for some demand on his pastoral ministrations, a demand which was seldom made, as he had a disruptive bedside manner and the funds of his chapel did not admit of the doles [59] which made sick Dallington people endure the consolations of the Church.

“No, thank you, they doan’t. I’ve just come to say good-bye.”

The minister’s forehead clouded—

“Oh, you’ve remembered me at last, have you? Thought it just as well not to forget old friends before you go off to make new ones. Come in.”

Tom, who had expected this greeting, followed Mr. Sumption upstairs into the room which he called his study, but which had few points of difference from any cottage living-room in Sunday Street. There was a frayed carpet with a lot of dirt trodden into it, and a sun-sucked wall-paper adhering as closely as possible to walls complicate of beams and bulges. A solitary book-shelf supported Jessica’s First Prayer, Edwin’s Trial or The Little Christian Witness, and kindred works, cheek-by-jowl with Burton’s Four Last Things and a cage of white mice. There was another cage hanging in the window, containing a broken-winged thrush which the pastor, after the failure of many anathemas, had bought from one of those mysterious gangs of small boys which prowl round villages. An old, old cat sat before the empty grate, too decrepit to make more than one attempt a day on the thrush or the mice, and now purring wheezily in the intervals of scratching a cankered ear.

On the table was a wild, unwieldy parcel, from whose bursting sides the contents were already beginning to ooze forth.

“I’m packing a parcel for Jerry,” said the minister. “I’d just finished when you knocked.”

“It looks as if it was coming undone,” said Tom.

“So it does”—and Mr. Sumption glanced deprecatingly at his handiwork. [60] “If only I had some sealing-wax ... but the shop’s shut.”

“It’ll be open to-morrow,” said Tom, and pictured Thyrza pulling up the blind and dusting the salmon-tins in the window ... long after he had gone to catch the early train from Hailsham.

“Well, to-morrow’s time enough, as I can’t post it before then. It ud be a pity for anything to get lost. There’s three shillings’ worth of things in that parcel.”

&ld............