“I don’t see why,” Sneyd remarked.  It was not true; he saw perfectly; but he enjoyed the rousing of Jim Peake into a warm altercation.

“Not at all,” said Mrs Lovatt, proudly.  “We shall have the organ, I’m sure.  There was an urgency committee meeting last night.  Titus Blackhurst has most generously given another hundred; he said it would be a shame if the bankruptcy of professed Methodists was allowed to prejudice the interests of the chapel.  And the organ-makers have taken fifty pounds off their price.  Now, who do you think has given another fifty?  Mr Copinger!  He stood up last night, Mr Blackhurst told me this morning, and he said, ’Friends, I’ve only seventy pounds in the world, but I’ll give fifty pounds towards this organ.’  There!  What do you think of that?  Isn’t he a grand fellow?”

“He is a grand fellow,” said Peake, with emphasis, reflecting that the total income of the minister could not exceed three hundred a year.

“So you see you’ll have to give your hundred,” Mrs Lovatt continued.  “You can’t do otherwise after that.”

There was a pause.

“I won’t give it,” said Peake.  “I’ve said I won’t, and I won’t.”

He could think of no argument.  To repeat that Eardley’s bankruptcy would cost him dear seemed trivial.  Nevertheless, the absence of any plausible argument served only to steel his resolution.

At that moment the servant opened the door.

“Mr Titus Blackhurst, senior, to see you, sir.”

Peake and his wife looked at one another in amazement, and Sneyd laughed quietly.

“He told me he should come up,” Mrs Lovatt explained.

“Show him into the breakfast-room, Clara,” said Mrs Peake to the servant.

Peake frowned angrily as he crossed the hall, but as he opened the breakfast-room door he contrived to straighten out his face into a semblance of urbanity.  Though he could have enjoyed accelerating the passage of his visitor into the street, there were excellent commercial reasons why he should adopt a less strenuous means towards the end which he had determined to gain.

“Glad to see you, Mr Blackhurst,” he began, a little awkwardly.

“You know, I suppose, what I’ve come for, Mr Peake,” said the old man, in that rich, deep, oily voice of which Mrs Lovatt, in one of those graphic phrases that came to her sometimes, had once remarked that it must have been “well basted in the cooking.”

“I suppose I do,” Peake answered diffidently.

Mr Blackhurst took off a wrinkled black glove, stroked his grey beard, and started on a long account of the inception and progress of the organ scheme.  Peake listened and was drawn into an admission that it was a good scheme and deserved to succeed.  Mr Blackhurst then went on to make plain that it was in danger of utterly collapsing, that only one man of “our Methodist friends” could save it, and that both Mrs Sutton and Mrs Lovatt had advised him to come and make a personal appeal to that man.