Doe moved slightly in his chair, as one does when a dentist touches a nerve.  Monty stopped, and then added: 

“‘A daily Mass’ is my short way of saying ’A daily celebration of the Holy Communion.’”

“Heavens!” thought I.  “He’s an R.C.”

I felt as though I had lost a friend.  Doe, however, was quicker in appraising the terrible facts.

“I s’pose you’re a High Churchman,” he said; and I’ve little doubt that he thereupon made up his mind to be a High Churchman too.  Monty groaned.  He placed in front of Doe his left wrist on which was clasped a bracelet identity disc.  He switched on to the disc a shaft of light from an electric torch, and we saw engraved on it his name and the letters “C.E.”

“That’s what I am, Gazelle,” said he, as the light went out, “C. of E., now and always.”

("Gazelle” was ostensibly a silly play on my friend’s name, but, doubtless, Doe’s sleek figure and brown eyes, which had made the name of “The Grey Doe” so appropriate, inspired Monty to style him “Gazelle.”)

“C. of E.,” muttered I, audibly.  “What a relief!”

“You beastly, little, supercilious snob!” exclaimed Monty, who was easily the rudest man I have ever met.

I didn’t mind him calling me “little,” for he so overtopped me intellectually that in his presence I never realised that I had grown tall.  I felt about fourteen.

“You beastly, little, intolerant, mediaeval humbug.  I suppose you think ‘C. of E.’ is the only respectable thing to be.  And yet your C. of E.-ism hasn’t—­” He stopped abruptly, as if he had just arrested himself in a tactless remark.

“Go on,” I said.

“And yet your religion,” he continued gently, “hasn’t proved much of a vital force in your life, has it?  Didn’t it go to pieces at the first assault of the world?”

“I s’pose it did,” I confessed humbly.

“Shall I tell you the outstanding religious fact of the war?” asked he.  “Let me recover my breath which your unspeakable friend here put out by calling me a ‘High Churchman,’ and then I’ll begin.  It begins eighty years ago.”

So Monty began the great story of the Catholic movement in the Church of England.  He told us of Keble and Pusey; he made heroes for us of Father Mackonochie dying amongst his dogs in the Scotch snows, and of Father Stanton, whose coffin was drawn through London on a barrow.  He knew how to capture the interest and sympathy of boy minds.  At the end of his stories about the heroes and martyrs of the Catholic movement, though we hadn’t grasped the theology of it, yet we knew we were on the side of Keble and Pusey, Mackonochie and Stanton.  We would have liked to be sent to prison for wearing vestments.

“But hang the vestments!” cried Monty in his vigorous way.  “Hang the cottas, the candles, and the incense!  What the Catholic movement really meant was the recovery for our Church of England—­God bless her—­of the old exalted ideas of the Mass and of the great practice of private confession.  ‘What we want,’ said the Catholic movement, ’is the faith of St. Augustine of Canterbury, and of St. Aidan of the North; the faith of the saints who built the Church of England, and not the faith of Queen Elizabeth, nor even of the Pope of Rome.’”