hich reminds me," said Armitage, glancing at his watch, "that I am
due for church. Come on, Joe," he added, "be a good chap."

Thornton in the goodness of his nature arose.

"All right," he said. "I'm game." Thornton had been a star full-back
at Annapolis when Armitage was an All America end, and he would have
gone to worse places than church for his old messmate.

Nowadays he spent his time in sinking the _Polyp_ among the silt on the
harbor bottom, for which work his crew received several dollars apiece,
extra pay, for each descent. Thornton received not even glory, unless
having gone to the floor of Long Island Sound with a President of the
United States be held as constituting glory.

CHAPTER V

AT TRINITY

Old Trinity rests on the hillside, serene in the afterglow of its one
hundred and eighty-four years. The spotless white walls, the green
blinds, the graceful Colonial spire, are meetly set in an environment
which strikes no note of dissonance. On either side are quaint, narrow
streets, lined with decent door-yards and houses almost as old as the
church. Within the cool interior the cottagers, and representatives of
a native aristocracy--direct descendants of the English of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who are so conservative, so
proudly, scornfully aloof, that one would doubt they existed at all,
were it not for their stately homes in the older sections of the city,
where giant elms keep watch and ward over eave and column and dormer
window, where hydrangeas sweep the doorstep, and faun and satyr, rough
hewn, peer through the shrubbery--sit primly in the box-like pews with
the preacher towering above them under the white sounding board.

The church was not half filled when Armitage and Thornton arrived, but
a double line of visitors were standing in the rear aisle. Armitage
caught the eye of one of the ushers and beckoned to him. But that
frock-coated, austere personage coldly turned his glance elsewhere and
Armitage had started forward to enlist his attention in a manner that
would admit of no evasion when his companion caught him by the sleeve,
chuckling.

"Look here, old chap," he whispered, "you have to wait until they know
how many pew-holders are going to be absent. This is n't a theatre."

Armitage turned his head to reply, when a rustling of skirts sounded
behind him and Thornton punched him in the ribs.

"The Wellington bunch," he whispered, "and the Russian they ha