“If I can be of service to your friends in explaining anything about the church they may wish, to know, pray command me, Sir Morton,” he said.  “But I presume that you and Mr, Leveson”—­here he glanced at the portly ‘Putty’ with a slight smile—­“have pointed out all that is necessary.”

“On the contrary!” said Mr. Marius Longford ’of the Savile and Savage,’ with a smoothly tolerant air; “We are really quite in the dark!  Do we understand, for example, that the restoration of this church is entirely due to your generosity, or to assistance from public funds and subscriptions?”

“The restoration is due, not to my ‘generosity,’” replied Walden, “but merely to my sense of what is fitting for Divine service.  I have had no assistance from any fund or from any individual, because I have not sought it.”

There was a pause, during which Mr. Longford fixed a pair of gold-rimmed glasses on his nose and gazed quizzically through them at Sir Morton Pippitt, whose countenance had grown uncomfortably purple in hue either with exterior heat or inward vexation.

“I thought.  Sir Morton,” he began slowly, when Mr. Leveson adroitly interrupted him by the query: 

“Now what period would you fix, Mr. Longford, for this sarcophagus?  I am myself inclined to think it of the fourteenth century.”

A soft low strain of music here crept through, the church,—­the village schoolmistress was beginning her practice.  She had a delicate touch, and the sounds her fingers pressed from the organ-keys were full, and solemn and sweet.  His Grace the Duke of Lumpton coughed loudly; he hated music, and always made some animal noise of his own to drown it.

“What matters the period!” murmured Julian Adderley, running his thin hand through his thick hair.  “Is it not sufficient to see it here among us, with us, of us?”

“God bless my soul!  I hope it is not of us!” spluttered Sir Morton with a kind of fat chuckle which seemed to emanate from his stiff collar rather than from his throat; “‘Ashes to ashes’ of course; we are all aware of that—­but not just yet!—­not just yet!”

“I am unable to fix the period satisfactorily to my own mind,” said Walden, quietly ignoring both Sir Morton and his observations on the Beyond; “though I have gone through considerable research with respect to the matter.  So I do not volunteer any opinion.  There is, however, no doubt that at one time the body contained in that coffer must have been of the nature termed by the old Church ‘miraculous.’  That is to say, it must have been supposed to be efficacious in times of plague or famine, for there are several portions of the alabaster which have evidently been worn away by the frequent pressure or touch of hands on the surface.  Probably in days when this neighbourhood was visited by infection, drought, floods or other troubles, the priests raised the coffin by the system of leverage which we discovered when excavating (and which is still in working order) and allowed the people to pass by and lay their hands upon it with a special prayer to be relieved of their immediate sickness or sorrow.  There were many such ‘miraculous’ shrines in the early part of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.”