n
later life it will repay thee."

Hartley's boy had not been mistaken when he heard Coryndon ask for a
prayer-book and saw him go out on foot. The small persistent bell
outside St. Jude's Church was ringing with desperate energy to collect
any worshippers who might feel inclined to assemble there for evensong,
and the worshippers when collected under the tin roof numbered nearly a
dozen.

It was a bare, barn-like Church, for the wealth of the Cantonment had
flowed in the direction of the Cathedral. The punkah mats flapped
languidly, and the lower part of the church was dark, only the chancel
being lighted with ungainly punkah-proof lamps, and the two altar
candles that threw their gleam on a plain gold cross, guttered in the
heat. A strip of cocoa-nut matting lay along the aisle, and the chancel
and altar steps were covered in sad, faded red. The organist did not
attend except on Sundays or Feast Days, and the service was plain,
conducted throughout by the Rev. Francis Heath.

Coryndon took a seat about half-way up the nave, and when Heath came
into the church, he watched him with interest. He liked to watch a man,
whom it was his business to study, without being disturbed, and Heath's
face in profile, as he knelt at the reading desk, or in full sight as he
stood to read the lesson, attracted the fixed gaze of, at least, one
member of the small congregation. There was no sermon and the service
was short, and as he sat quietly in his place, Coryndon wondered what
frenzied moment of fear or despair could have driven this man into the
company of Joicey and Mrs. Draycott Wilder, unconscious perhaps of their
connection with him, but linked nevertheless by an invisible thread that
wound around them all.

Beyond the fact that he had seen Mrs. Wilder, he had not taken her under
the close observation of his mental microscope. She stood on one side
until such time as he should have need to probe into her reasons for
silence, and he wondered if Hartley was right, and if, by chance, the
earnest face of the clergyman, with its burning, stricken eyes, had
appealed to her sympathy. Could it be so, he asked himself once or
twice, but the immediate question was the one that Coryndon gave his
mind to answer, and just then he was forming an impression of the Rev.
Francis Heath.

He looked at his hands, at his thin neck, at the hollows in his cheeks
and the emotional quiver at the corner of his mouth, and he knew the man
was a fana