But the last caller was the most trying of all.
Rachel heard her mother-in-law open the front door and walk heavily across the little hall.
"What has Luke been doing?" she exclaimed almost before she was in the room. "I hear he has quite estranged the four best supporters of the Church." She looked at Rachel as if she were to blame.
"It was about the amusement question," said Rachel. "He put down his foot at the proposal to introduce them into the work of the parish."
"Well I call it remarkably silly of him. It is a matter of very little importance and certainly not worth wrangling over. I am quite thankful I am not a member of the Council. I could not have voted against my son, but I should have felt very vexed at being a party to such a loss to the Church."
"You mean?"
"I mean losing his four best financial supporters, and those who give the most to the Easter offerings. Who is he to look to now, I should like to know? And if he only waited to consider the state of his own finances and the expense of food, (eggs are still fourpence a piece), he would not have made such a fatal mistake."
Rachel was silent, but she disagreed with every word her mother-in-law had spoken. Then after a pause during which Mrs. Greville tied and untied her bonnet strings in her agitation, she said:
"I don't suppose any consideration respecting finance would weigh with Luke against doing what he thinks right."
"My dear, young men often make a fatal mistake in going their own way, thinking that youth must know better than age. Think of those four gray haired men who know more of the world than Luke, being set at nought like that. I have never known Luke to make such a mistake. If he had only consulted me before he had acted."