The Lady Augusta Willcocks, a fierce and efficient Guardian, tramping the wards in short skirts, broad-toed boots, and cropped woolly white hair, cross-questioned the Master as to what Mr. Caspar said to the inmates.
The Master, a kind man, something of a mystic himself, answered:
"He don't seem to say much. Mostly he listens."
"Oh, that's all right," said the lady with relief. "Only we don't want a lot of nonsense talked in here."
"Seems to soothe em," continued the Master. "Afore now when I've had them violent in the casuals' cells I've sent for him. They call him the Prophet."
The Master smiled to himself as the masterful lady tramped on her way.
He had noticed that Edward Caspar invariably left the ward when the Reverend Spink entered to hold Divine Service; and that if the Archdeacon marched through the wards like a conqueror amid the dreadful human debris of a battle-field the visitor, sitting quietly at the bedside of some cast-away, never seemed to see him.
In spite of the pressure of affairs, Ernie rarely failed to lure his father out into the sunshine on the hill.
Once, as they sat together by the roadside in Beech-hangar, Ernie propounded a solemn question.
"Dad."