The Poplar meeting was crowded.  In an atmosphere of good fellowship one speaker after another got up and denounced the present order.  It was difficult to follow the arguments of the speakers, because the audience cheered so many isolated statements.  A number of people shook hands with Father Rowley when he had finished his speech and wished that there were more parsons like him.  Father Rowley had not indulged in political attacks, but had contented himself with praise of the poor.  He had spoken movingly, but Mark was not moved by his words.  He had a vague feeling that Father Rowley was being exploited.  He was dazed by the exuberance of the meeting and was glad when it was over and he was back in Portman Square talking to Lady Pechell and Mrs. Mannakay while Father Rowley rested for an hour before he walked round the corner to preach in old Jamaica Chapel, a galleried Georgian conventicle that was now the Church of the Visitation, but was still generally known as Jamaica Chapel.  Evensong was half over when the preacher arrived, and the church being full Mark was given a chair by the sidesman in a dark corner, which presently became darker when Father Rowley went up into the pulpit, for all the lights were lowered except those above the preacher’s head, and nothing was visible in the church except the luminous crucifix upon the High Altar.  The warmth and darkness brought out the scent of the many women gathered together; the atmosphere was charged with human emotion so that Mark sitting in his corner could fancy that he was lost in the sensuous glooms behind some Mater Addolorata of the seventeenth century.  He longed to be back in Chatsea.  He was dismayed at the prospect of one day perhaps having to cope with this quality of devotion.  He shuddered at the thought, and for the first time he wondered if he had not a vocation for the monastic life.  But was it a vocation if one longed to escape the world?  Must not a true vocation be a longing to draw nearer to God?  Oh, this nauseating bouquet of feminine perfumes . . . it was impossible to pay attention to the sermon.

Mark went to bed early with a headache; but in the morning he woke refreshed with the knowledge that they were going back to Chatsea, although before they reached home the journey had to be broken at High Thorpe whither Father Rowley had been summoned to an interview by the Bishop of Silchester on account of refusing to communicate some people at the mid-day celebration.  Dr. Crawshay was at that time so ill that he received the Chatsea Missioner in bed, and on hearing that he was accompanied by a young man who hoped to take Holy Orders the Bishop sent word for Mark to come up to his bedroom, where he gave him his blessing.  Mark never forgot the picture of the Bishop lying there under a chequered coverlet looking like an old ivory chessman, a white bishop that had been taken in the game and put off the board.

“And now, Mr. Rowley,” Dr. Crawshay began when he had motioned Mark to a chair.  “To return to the subject under discussion between us.  How can you justify by any rubric of the Book of Common Prayer non-communicating attendance?”