It was the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, and the collect began with the words:  O God, whose blessed Son was manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil, and make us the sons of God, and heirs of Eternal life.  Philip read it through.  He could make no sense of it.  He began saying the words aloud to himself, but many of them were unknown to him, and the construction of the sentence was strange.  He could not get more than two lines in his head.  And his attention was constantly wandering:  there were fruit trees trained on the walls of the vicarage, and a long twig beat now and then against the windowpane; sheep grazed stolidly in the field beyond the garden.  It seemed as though there were knots inside his brain.  Then panic seized him that he would not know the words by tea-time, and he kept on whispering them to himself quickly; he did not try to understand, but merely to get them parrot-like into his memory.

Mrs. Carey could not sleep that afternoon, and by four o’clock she was so wide awake that she came downstairs.  She thought she would hear Philip his collect so that he should make no mistakes when he said it to his uncle.  His uncle then would be pleased; he would see that the boy’s heart was in the right place.  But when Mrs. Carey came to the dining-room and was about to go in, she heard a sound that made her stop suddenly.  Her heart gave a little jump.  She turned away and quietly slipped out of the front-door.  She walked round the house till she came to the dining-room window and then cautiously looked in.  Philip was still sitting on the chair she had put him in, but his head was on the table buried in his arms, and he was sobbing desperately.  She saw the convulsive movement of his shoulders.  Mrs. Carey was frightened.  A thing that had always struck her about the child was that he seemed so collected.  She had never seen him cry.  And now she realised that his calmness was some instinctive shame of showing his fillings:  he hid himself to weep.

Without thinking that her husband disliked being wakened suddenly, she burst into the drawing-room.

“William, William,” she said.  “The boy’s crying as though his heart would break.”

Mr. Carey sat up and disentangled himself from the rug about his legs.

“What’s he got to cry about?”

“I don’t know....  Oh, William, we can’t let the boy be unhappy.  D’you think it’s our fault?  If we’d had children we’d have known what to do.”

Mr. Carey looked at her in perplexity.  He felt extraordinarily helpless.

“He can’t be crying because I gave him the collect to learn.  It’s not more than ten lines.”

“Don’t you think I might take him some picture books to look at, William?  There are some of the Holy Land.  There couldn’t be anything wrong in that.”

“Very well, I don’t mind.”