“Ah!” he murmured, and then paused.  “We aren’t all like you, Mrs Sutton.  I wish to God we were.  But seriously, I’m not for giving that hundred; it’s against my grain, and that’s flat—­you’ll excuse me speaking plain.”

“I like it,” she said quickly.  “Then I know where I am.”

“No,” he reiterated firmly, “I’m not for giving that hundred.”

“Then I’m bound to say I’m sorry,” she returned kindly.  “The whole scheme will be ruined, for it’s one of those schemes that can only be carried out in a particular way—­if they aren’t done on the inspiration of the moment they’re not done at all.  Not that I care so much for the organ itself.  It’s the idea that was so grand.  Fancy—­nine hundred pounds all in a minute; such a thing was never known in Bursley Chapel before!”

“Well,” said Peake, “I guess when it comes to the pinch they’ll find someone else instead of me.”

“They won’t; there isn’t another man who could afford it and trade so bad.”

Peake was silent; but he was inflexible.  Not even Mrs Sutton could make the suggestion of this subscription seem other than grossly unfair to him, an imposition on his good-nature.

“Think it over,” she said abruptly, after he had assisted her to alight at the top of Trafalgar Road.  “Think it over, to oblige me.”

“I’d do anything to oblige you,” he replied.  “But I’ll tell you this”—­he put his mouth to her ear and whispered, half-smiling at the confession.  “You call me a generous man, but whenever that organ’s mentioned I feel just like a miser—­yes, as hard as a miser.  Good-bye!  I’m very glad to have had the pleasure of driving you up.”  He beamed on her as the horse shot forward.

III

This was on Tuesday.  During the next few days Peake went through a novel and very disturbing experience.  He gradually became conscious of the power of that mysterious and all-but-irresistible moral force which is called public opinion.  His own public of friends and acquaintances connected with the chapel seemed to be, for some inexplicable reason, against him on the question of the organ subscription.  They visited him, even to the Rev. Mr Copinger (whom he heartily admired as having “nothing of the parson” about him), and argued quietly, rather severely, and then left him with the assurance that they relied on his sense of what was proper.  He was amazed and secretly indignant at this combined attack.  He thought it cowardly, unscrupulous; it resembled brigandage.  He felt most acutely that no one had any right to demand from him that hundred pounds, and that they who did so transgressed one of those unwritten laws which govern social intercourse.  Yet these transgressors were his friends, people who had earned his respect in years long past and kept it through all the intricate situations arising out of daily contact.  They could defy him to withdraw his respect now; and, without knowing it, they did.  He was left brooding, pained, bewildered.  The explanation was simply this:  he had failed to perceive that the grandiose idea of the ninefold organ fund had seized, fired, and obsessed the imaginations of the Wesleyan community, and that under the unwonted poetic stimulus they were capable of acting quite differently from their ordinary selves.