“Yes, Roger dear, we’ll come.”

“You won’t ... make fun of it?”

“Oh no!  Oh no!” Her voice was hesitant, intimate, girlishly shy.  “We haven’t seen nearly as much of each other as a mother and son ought.  There are lots of things about me you don’t know.  For all you know, what you said of Richard a moment ago ... might be true of me....”

“What I said about Richard?...”

“About times when one feels life too difficult and wants Someone to help one....”

She spoke seductively, mysteriously, as if she were promising him a pleasure; and he answered in a voluptuous whining:  “Oh, mother, if I could bring you to Jesus!  Oh, Jesus! you are giving me everything I want!” But in the midst of his rapture his face changed and he started to his feet, so violently that his chair nearly fell backwards.  “Yes,” he cried reproachfully, “Jesus gives me everything, and this is how I reward Him!”

They all stared at him, except Poppy, who was gloomily reading the tea-leaves in her cup.

“I told a lie!” he answered their common mute enquiry.

“A silly, vain lie.  I told you they’d asked me to take the Saturday evening service to-night.  They didn’t.  I offered to take it.  Nobody ever asks me to preach.  They say I can’t.  Mind you, I don’t think they’re right.  I think that if they would let me practise I wouldn’t speak so badly.  But that’s not the point.  I told a lie.  I distinctly said they’d asked me to preach because I wanted to pretend that I was making a success of things like Richard always does.  Oh, what a thing to do to Jesus!”

“But, dear, that was only because you were speaking in a hurry.  It wasn’t a deliberate lie.”

“Oh, mother, you don’t understand,” he fairly squealed.  “You haven’t been saved, you see, and you’re still lax about these things.  It does matter!  It was a lie!  I ought to wrestle this thing out on my knees.  Mother, will it put anybody out if I go into the parlour and pray?”

Marion answered tenderly:  “My dear, of course you can,” but Poppy clicked down her cup into its saucer and said in a tone of sluggish, considered exasperation:  “You haven’t time.  We ought to be at the chapel half an hour before the meeting.  It’s a quarter to six now.”

“Oh dear! oh dear!  Is it as late as that?  I wanted to write on a piece of paper what I’m going to say!  Now I won’t have time!  Oh, and I did want to preach well!  Oh, where’s my cap?” He began to stumble about the room.

Presently he caught his foot in one of the electric light cords and set an alabaster lamp on the mantelpiece rocking on its pedestal.  Richard and Marion watched him and it with that set, horrified stare which the anticipation of disorder always provoked in them.  “Tcha!” exclaimed Poppy contemptuously.  “But it’s there!  On the armchair!” cried Ellen:  she could not bear the look on Richard’s and Marion’s faces.  “Where?” asked Poppy.  It was the first time she had spoken directly to Ellen.  “There!  There!  Among the cushions,” she answered, and rose and went round the table to pick it up herself.  Richard came and helped her.