Nell put on her hat and coat and started for school. A neat, shabby little figure, with her town hat pulled down over her soft hair, she walked quickly between dust-powdered hedges to Brownbread Street, panting a little, because she was an?mic, and also because she was still a trifle indignant. Nell did not view life and the War as her family viewed them. Her different education had made them not quite such matters of bread-and-cheese. She alone at Worge had felt the humiliation—as distinct from the inconvenience—of Tom’s conscription. She had always despised him because he did not volunteer during the early stages of the War, and when the Conscription Act came into force she despised him still more for his appeal to the Tribunal. She felt that she could never think proudly of him, knowing how unwillingly he had gone, knowing that he cared for nothing except leaving Worge, that he never thought of the great cause of righteousness he was to fight for, or understood the mighty issues of his unwilling warfare.

The rest of the family were all of a block. To her mother the War was merely a matter of prices and scarcities, to her father it was drink restrictions and the closing of public-houses, to Ivy it was picture postcards and boys in khaki, to Harry the unwilling performance of tasks which would otherwise have been done by more efficient hands, to Zacky the obscure man?uvres of a gang of small boys whose imaginations had been touched by militarism. To Nell alone belonged the fret and anxiety of the times, the shock of bad news, the struggle [69] of ineffectual small labours to win her a place in the great woe.

To-day she was early for school, as she had meant to be, for at the church she stopped and sat down in the porch. St. Wilfred’s, Brownbread Street, was only a chapel-of-ease under the mother church of Dallington. It was new-built of sandstone, an unfortunate symbol of that Rock against which the gates of hell shall not prevail. The interior, glimpsed through the open door, was dim and medi?val, the first effect due to the deep tones of the stained-glass windows, where the saints wore robes of crimson and sapphire and passional violet, and the latter to the several dark oil paintings, and the thick gilt tracery of the screen, through which the altar showed richly coloured, with one winking red light before it.

The curate-in-charge of Brownbread Street was of medi?val tendencies, and did his best, both in service and sermon, to transport his congregation from the woodbine-age to the age of pilgrimages and monasteries, with the result that, with unmedi?val licence, they sought illicit and heretical refreshment in Georgian Bethels and Victorian Tabernacles, where they could sing good Moody and Sankey tunes, instead of treacherous Gregorians and wobbling Plainsong.

But Nell loved the low, soft, creeping tones of Gregory’s mode, loved the dimness, the mystery, the faint echo of Sarum ... and if in her love was a personal element which she denied, the church was not less a refuge from the coarse frustrations of her everyday life, such as the Forge was to Mr. Sumption and the Shop had been to Tom.

To-day the priest was at the altar, saying the Last Gospel. Nell could just see him from where she sat. He would be out in a couple of minutes. She watched him glide off into the shadows, the............