He allowed Mr. Raymond to choose the design for this window.  He only stipulated that the subject should be Jonah and the whale.  “There’s no story’ll compare with it for trying a man’s faith.”

When the window came, and was erected, he complained that it left out most of the whale, of which the jaws and one wicked little red eye were all that appeared.  “It looks half-hearted.  Why didn’t they swim en all in?  ‘Tis neck or nothin’ wi’ that story; but they’ve made it neck and nothin’.  An’ after colouring en violet too!”

In return, the Vicar had hunted up some county histories and heraldic works in the library at Tredinnis, and was now busy re-emblazoning with his own hand the devices carved on the Moyle pew.

Little by little, too, the congregation had grown.  The people came shyly at first.  They mistrusted the Established Church.  But they treated the Vicar with politeness when he visited them.  And seeing him so awkward, and how with all his book-learning he listened to their opinions and blushed when he offered any small service, they grew to like him, being shy themselves.  They pitied him too, knowing the old Squire better than he did.  So from Sunday to Sunday Taffy, pulling at his rope in the belfry, counted the new-comers, and Humility talked about them on the way home and at dinner.  They were fisher folk for the most part; the men in blue guernseys and corduroy trousers, and some with curled black beards and rings in their ears; the women, in gayer colours than you see in an up-country church; a southern-seeming race, with southern-sounding names—­Santo, Jose, Hugo, Bennet, Cara.  They belonged—­so Mr. Raymond often told himself—­to the class which Christ called His Apostles.  Sometimes, scanning an olive-coloured face, he would be minded of the Sea of Gennesareth; and, a minute later, the sight of the grey coast-line with its whirled spray would chill the fancy.

The congregation always lingered outside the porch after service; and then one would say to another:  “Wall, there’s more in the man than you’d think.  See you up to the meetin’ this evenin’ I s’pose?  So long!”

But having come once, they came again.  And the family at the Parsonage were full of hope, though Taffy longed sometimes for a play-fellow, and sometimes for he knew not what, and Humility bent over her lace pillow and thought of green lanes and of Beer Village and women at work by sunshiny doorways; and wondered if their faces had changed.

     “O, that I were where I would be! 
        Then would I be where I am not;
      But where I am, there I must be,
        And where I would be, I cannot.”

She never told a soul of her home thoughts.  Her husband never guessed them.  But Taffy (without knowing why), whenever this verse from his old playbook came into his head, connected it with his mother.

But the old Squire was getting impatient.  He took quite a feudal view of the saving of his soul, and would have dragged the whole parish to church by main force, had it been possible.