of you will be preaching at Mass?"

"My dear fellow, the Vicar always preaches at Mass. I shall be preaching
at Evening Prayer. Why don't you come to supper in the Clergy House
afterward?"

"How do you like your Vicar?"

"Oh, very sound, very sound," said Chator, shaking his head.

"Does he take the ablutions at the right moment?" asked Michael,
twinkling.

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes. He's very sound. Quite all right. I was afraid at
first he was going to be a leetle High Church. But he's not. Not a bit.
We had a procession this June on Corpus Christi. The people liked it.
And of course we've got the children."

They talked for an hour of old friends, of Viner, of Dom Cuthbert and
Clere Abbey and schooldays, until at last Chator had to be going.

"You will come on Sunday?"

"Of course. But what's the name of your church?"

"My dear fellow, that shows you haven't heard your parochial Mass," said
Chator, with mock seriousness. "St. Chad's is our church."

"It sounds as if you had a saintly fish for Patron," said Michael.

"I say, steady. Steady. St. Chad, you know, of Lichfield."

Michael laughed loudly.

"My dear old Chator, you are just as inimitable as ever. You haven't
changed a bit. Well, Saint Chad's--Sunday."

From the window he watched Chator hurrying along beside the brindled
walls. He thought how every excited step he took showed him to be
bubbling over with the joy of telling Nigel Stewart of such a
coincidence in the district of the Senior Curate.

Michael suggested to Barnes that he should come with him to church on
Sunday, and Barnes, who evidently thought his salary demanded deference
to Michael's wishes, made no objection. It was an October evening
through which a wintry rawness had already penetrated, and the interior
of St. Chad's with its smell of people and warm wax and stale incense
was significant of comfort and shelter. The church, a dreary Byzantine
edifice, was nevertheless a very essential piece of London, being built
of the yellow bricks whose texture and color more than that of any other
material adapt themselves to the grime of the city. Nothing deliberately
beautiful would have had power here. These people who sat thawing in a
stupor of waiting felt at home. They were submerged in London streets,
and their church was as deeply engulfed as themselves. The Stations of
the Cross did not seem much more strange here than the lithographs in
their own kitchens, and the raucous drone of Gre