“Why, of course,” Frida cried impulsively, with prompt decision; “Robert’s Gladstone bag and my little brown trunk would be the very things for him.  I could lend them to him at once, if only we can get a Sunday cab to take them.”

“Not before service, surely,” Philip interposed, scandalised.  “If he were to take them now, you know, he’d meet all the church-people.”

“Is it taboo, then, to face the clergy with a Gladstone bag?” Bertram asked quite seriously, in that childlike tone of simple inquiry that Philip had noticed more than once before in him.  “Your bonzes object to meet a man with luggage?  They think it unlucky?”

Frida and Philip looked at one another with quick glances, and laughed.

“Well, it’s not exactly tabooed,” Frida answered gently; “and it’s not so much the rector himself, you know, as the feelings of one’s neighbours.  This is a very respectable neighbourhood—­oh, quite dreadfully respectable—­and people in the houses about might make a talk of it if a cab drove away from the door as they were passing.  I think, Phil, you’re right.  He’d better wait till the church-people are finished.”

“Respectability seems to be a very great object of worship in your village,” Bertram suggested in perfect good faith.  “Is it a local cult, or is it general in England?”

Frida glanced at him, half puzzled.  “Oh, I think it’s pretty general,” she answered, with a happy smile.  “But perhaps the disease is a little more epidemic about here than elsewhere.  It affects the suburbs:  and my brother’s got it just as badly as any one.”

“As badly as any one!” Bertram repeated with a puzzled air.  “Then you don’t belong to that creed yourself?  You don’t bend the knee to this embodied abstraction?—­it’s your brother who worships her, I suppose, for the family?”

“Yes; he’s more of a devotee than I am,” Frida went on, quite frankly, but not a little surprised at so much freedom in a stranger.  “Though we’re all of us tarred with the same brush, no doubt.  It’s a catching complaint, I suppose, respectability.”

Bertram gazed at her dubiously.  A complaint, did she say?  Was she serious or joking?  He hardly understood her.  But further discussion was cut short for the moment by Frida good-humouredly running upstairs to see after the Gladstone bag and brown portmanteau, into which she crammed a few useless books and other heavy things, to serve as make-weights for Miss Blake’s injured feelings.

“You’d better wait a quarter of an hour after we go to church,” she said, as the servant brought these necessaries into the room where Bertram and Philip were seated.  “By that time nearly all the church-people will be safe in their seats; and Phil’s conscience will be satisfied.  You can tell Miss Blake you’ve brought a little of your luggage to do for to-day, and the rest will follow from town to-morrow morning.”

“Oh, how very kind you are!” Bertram exclaimed, looking down at her gratefully.  “I’m sure I don’t know what I should ever have done in this crisis without you.”