“Didn’t you know?” she replied. “We all go in solemn procession. We walk—for piety’s sake—it’s over a mile across the fields—and we are rounded up in lots of time, because it’s a dreadful thing to get there after the bell has stopped.”
“Interrupting the service,” I put in with the usual inanity that is essential to the maintenance of this kind of conversation.
“It’s worse than that,” Miss Tattersall explained gaily; “because Mr. Sturton waits for the Jervaises, to begin. When we’re late we hold up the devotions of the whole parish.”
“Good Lord!” I commented; sincerely, this time; and with a thought of my socialist friend Banks. I could still sympathise with him on that score, even though I was now strongly inclined to side with the Jervaises in the Brenda affair.
“Yes, isn’t it?” Miss Tattersall agreed. “Of course, they are the only important people in the place,” she added thoughtfully.
“So important that it’s slightly presumptuous to worship God without the sanction of their presence in church,” I remarked. And then, feeling that this comment was a trifle too strong for my company, I tried to cover it by changing the subject.
“I say, do you think we ought to stay on here over the week-end?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be more tactful of us to invent excuses and leave them to themselves?”
“Certainly it would. Have you only just thought of it?” Miss Tattersall said pertly. “Nora and I agreed about that before we came down to prayers. But there’s a difficulty that seems, for the moment, insuperable.”
“Which is?” I prompted her.
“No conveyance,” she explained. “There aren’t any Sunday trains on the loop line, Hurley Junction is fifteen miles away, and the Jervaises’ car is Heaven knows where and the only other that is borrowable, Mr. Turnbull’s, is derelict just outside the Park gates.”