“Ah, please, please,” said Lady Arabel, “don’t talk in that dretful way.  Don’t let your mind dwell on the worst.  I assure you that you will be all right.”

“Of course I shall be all right, as you put it,” said the elderly lady, coldly drawing herself up.  “Everybody can be my witness that I have kept my candle burning in my small corner——­”

“Good gracious,” shrieked the kittenish mother.  “A candle burning to-night.  And probably unshaded.  Don’t you know that those fiends in the sky are always on the watch for the slightest illumination?”

“Fiends in the sky!” exclaimed the sheeted lady.  “Do you mean to say they are abroad even at this solemn moment?”

“Oh, don’t talk such rot,” implored the hard flapper.  “Who the dickens do you suppose was responsible for that crash?”

“Responsible for the crash!” said the other, whose tones were becoming more and more alive with exclamation marks.  “Is then the solemn work of summoning us entrusted to the minions of the Evil One?”

A series of crashes interrupted her, the work of the adjacent gun.  The earth shook, and each report was followed by the curious ethereal wail of shells on their way.

“What, again?” exclaimed Lady Arabel’s sheeted neighbour.  “I should have thought one would have been ample.  But still, one cannot be too careful, and some people are heavy sleepers.  I heard the first myself without any possibility of mistake, and rose at once, though the slab lay heavy on my chest——­”

“Most unwise,” said Lady Arabel, “to touch that sort of thing late at night.  I always have a little Benger myself.”

Sarah Brown happened to look at Richard.  His eyes were shut, but he was smiling very broadly with tight lips, and his face was turned towards the ceiling.  His fingers were very tense and busy on his lap, as though he were still fidgeting with magic.  But her study of him was interrupted by the loud denouncing voice of the very venerable man who had led the procession of late-comers.

“A dog in this hallowed place,” he said, pointing at the deeply disconcerted Rupert who was weaving himself nervously in and out of his master’s legs.  “Never in all the forty years of my ministration here have I allowed such an outrage——­”

“Gently, gently, my dear sir,” protested the Vicar, a little roused.  “I am the minister of this church, and the dog is mine.  I was indeed about to turn it out when you entered, after which I lost sight of it for a moment.  Rupert, go home.”

Rupert howled again, and lay down as if about to faint.

“Forty years have I been Vicar of this parish,” said the veteran, “and never——­”

“What?” interrupted the Vicar, “Forty years Vicar of this parish.  Then you must be Canon Burstley-Ripp.  How very extraordinary, I always understood that he passed away quite ten years ago.”

He approached the old man and strove to button-hole him.  The sheet at first foiled him in this intention, but he presently contented himself with seizing a little corner of it, by which he led his aged brother vicar into a corner.  There they could be heard for some time misunderstanding each other in low earnest tones.