Mrs Steele looked at her husband earnestly.  “If you believe that—­”

“But I do believe it,” he interrupted.

“If you believe that,” she persisted, “I can understand your doubting, even despairing over a hundred things. . . .  But below it all I feel that you are angry with something deeper.”

“Eh?”

“With something in yourself.”

“Yes, you’re right,” he answered savagely.  “You shall know what it is,” said he, on the instant correcting himself to tenderness, “when I’ve taken hat and stick and gone out and wrestled with it.”

As luck would have it, on his way down the hill he encountered Mr Hambly, and delivered his message.

“The notion is that we form a small Emergency Committee.  Here at home, in the next few weeks or months, many things will want doing.  For the most important, we must keep an eye on the wives and families whose breadwinners have gone off to fight; see that they get their allotments of pay and separation allowances; and administer as wisely as we can the relief funds that are already being started.  Also the ladies will desire, no doubt, to form working-parties, make hospital shirts, knit socks, tear and roll lint for bandages.  My wife even suggests an ambulance class; and I have written to Mant, at St Martin’s, who may be willing to come over (say) once a week and teach us the rudiments of ‘First Aid’ on the chance—­a remote one, I own—­ that one of these days we may get a boat-load of wounded at Polpier.  I’ll admit, too, that all these preparations may well strike you as petty, and even futile.  But they may be good, anyhow, for our own souls’ health.  They will give us a sense of helping.”

Mr Hambly took off his spectacles and wiped them, for his eyes were moist.  “Do you know,” said he, smiling, “that I was on my way to visit you with a very similar proposal? . . .  Now, as you are a good thirty years younger than I, and, moreover, have been springing downhill while I have been toiling laboriously up—­” He glanced down at his club foot.

—­“That I took duty for you and did the long-windedness,” put in the Vicar with a laugh.  “And I haven’t quite finished yet.  The idea is (I should add) that, as in politics, so with our religious differences, we all declare a truce of God.  In Heaven’s name let us all pull together for once and forget our separation of creeds!”

The Minister rubbed his eyes gently; for the trouble, after all, seemed to be with them and not with his spectacles.

“And I ought to add,” said he, “that the first suggestion of such a Committee came from the ladies of my congregation.  The only credit I can claim is for a certain obstinacy in resisting those who would have confined the effort to our Society. . . .  Most happily I managed to prevail—­and it was none the easier because I happen just now to be a little out of odour with some of the more influential members of what I suppose must be termed my ‘flock.’”