“I am glad you think so. But why did they strike you as so particularly nice?”
She thought it was a question that he need not have put, but took pains with her reply.
“Oh, they looked so homely, and attentive, and—and—un-smart. I liked them so much better than the London congregation I am used to. Felicity’s ‘Pope,’ as you call him, has all the mondaines and demi-mondaines too at his feet.”
“But I thought you did not sit under Felicity’s Oracle; I thought you told me that you usually went to church with Tom.”
Miss Ransome wished, with a momentary impatience, that her companion’s memory for her statements was not so good, as it might lead to inconveniences in the long run, but she answered readily—
“Latterly, Felicity usually took me with her. Tom often had a cold or an engagement on Sunday morning.”
She laughed off further inquiries with her airy cynicism, and having the best reasons for preferring the rôle of questioner to questioned, began an indirect catechism concerning the congregation, whose motive Mr. Tancred did not suspect.
“It all seemed so patriarchal; everybody looked like tenants and farmers, and people of that class. I suppose your neighbours have churches of their own to go to?”
“John Drake occasionally bicycles over to Morning Service.”
“John Drake?” She looked across the road at him with a sudden alertness of interest. Did John Drake sound like the name of the South African millionaire who was to pilot her out of her present slough of dependence and manœuvring to the odious but indispensable anchorage of marriage? “Who is John Drake? Is it very benighted of me never to have heard of him?”