"Personally a charming fellow," went on Mr. Fyshe; "but is he, all said and done, quite the man to conduct a church? In the first place, he is not a businessman."
"No," said Mr. Newberry reluctantly, "that I admit."
"Very good. And, secondly, even in the matter of his religion itself, one always feels as if he were too little fixed, too unstable. He simply moves with the times. That, at least, is what people are beginning to say of him, that he is perpetually moving with the times. It doesn't do, Newberry, it doesn't do." Whereupon Mr. Newberry went away troubled and wrote to Fareforth Furlong a confidential letter with a signed cheque in it for the amount of Mr. Fyshe's interest, and with such further offerings of dynamite, of underpinning and blasting as his conscience prompted.
When the rector received and read the note and saw the figures of the cheque, there arose such a thankfulness in his spirit as he hadn't felt for months, and he may well have murmured, for the repose of Mr. Newberry's soul, a prayer not found in the rubric of King James.
All the more cause had he to feel light at heart, for as it chanced, it was on that same evening that the Dumfarthings, father and daughter, were to take tea at the rectory. Indeed, a few minutes before six o'clock they might have been seen making their way from the manse to the rectory.
On their way along the avenue the minister took occasion to reprove his daughter for the worldliness of her hat (it was a little trifle from New York that she had bought out of the Sunday School money—a temporary loan); and a little further on he spoke to her severely about the parasol she carried; and further yet about the strange fashion, specially condemned by the Old Testament, in which she wore her hair. So Catherine knew in her heart from this that she must be looking her very prettiest, and went into the rectory radiant.
The tea was, of course, an awkward meal at the best. There was an initial difficulty about grace, not easily surmounted. And when the Rev. Mr. Dumfarthing sternly refused tea as a pernicious drink weakening to the system, the Anglican rector was too ignorant of the presbyterian system to know enough to give him Scotch whiskey.
But there were bright spots in the meal as well. The rector was even able to ask Catherine, sideways as a personal question, if she played tennis; and she was able to whisper behind her hand, "Not allowed," and to make a face in the direction of her father, who was absorbed for the moment in a theological question with Juliana. Indeed, before the conversation became general again the rector had contrived to make a rapid arrangement with Catherine whereby she was to come with him to the Newberry's tennis court the day following and learn the game, with or without permission.
So the tea was perhaps a success in its way. And it is noteworthy that Juliana spent the days that followed it in reading Calvin's "Institutes" (specially loaned to her) and "Dumfarthing on the Certainty of Damnation" (a gift), and in praying for her brother—a task practically without hope. During which same time the rector in white flannels, and Catherine in a white duck skirt and blouse, were flying about on the green grass of the Newberrys' court, and calling, "love," "love all," to one another so gaily and so brazenly that even Mr. Newberry felt that there must be something in it.
But all these things came merely as interludes in the moving currents of greater events; for as the summer faded into autumn and autumn into winter the anxieties of the trustees of St. Asaph's began to call for action of some sort.