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uninterrupted hour by the fire before his ‘proper’ tea—a
meal which consisted as a rule of tea and an egg. After this there was often
another gap of an hour or so before the beginning of evening engagements.
    On this unpleasant November day Howat occupied both odd hours in reading a
book which would have deeply shocked ninety per cent of his congregation had
there been the slightest possibility of their understanding it. It was
Jeans’s “The Universe Around Us,” borrowed from the local
library, which had obtained it at his own request.
    As Mary had predicted, there was only a very small attendance at the Young
People’s Guild that evening. The Guild was one of Howat’s pet
institutions; he had founded it himself some half-dozen years before, and it
had flourished, he ventured to think, as handsomely as could have been
expected. It met weekly during the winter months; in summer there were
country rambles, visits to places of interest, and so on. It had always been
Howat’s idea to make it a centre of secular enlightenment
(backgrounded, of course, by the chapel atmosphere); most of the weekly talks
were on literary, musical, or artistic subjects—very few were
definitely religious. This aspect alienated the sympathies of some of the
older people, who thought that Howat was coddling the young and shirking his
plain job of rubbing religion into them. Howat, though, did not care about
that; if there were ever to be a choice (though there would not be if he
could help it) he was all out for the young; the old, he felt, were so
confident of attaining Heaven that they could look after themselves.
    As founder and president, Howat always opened the terminal session by an
address on some subject or other; it also fell to him to fill in any gaps
made by speakers dropping out after the programme had been made up. This
November Monday was one of these gap-filling occasions, his talk on Mozart
being in lieu of a paper on modern town-planning by a young local
architect.
    The place of meeting was a bleak schoolroom furnished and panelled in
pitch pine—a very hot room at one corner near a stove, and very cold
and draughty elsewhere. Nothing relieved the brown varnished monotony of the
walls except a map of Palestine and a tattered and faded temperance banner. A
desk stood on a slightly raised platform, and on the desk lay a Bible, a
hymn- book, and a carafe of water. (The room was used regularly for Sunday
School and other chapel functions.) There was also a cupboard which, when
incautiously opened, usually emitted a cascade of ragged hymn-books and
tea-party crockery. Two inverted T-shaped gas-brackets shed a hissing
illumination over the rather melancholy scene, and this evening wisps of fog
curled in fitfully when the green-baize doors opened from the vestibule.
    Howat gazed with a certain dreamy satisfaction on the dozen or so young
persons who comprised his audience. In some ways they satisfied him as much
as a far larger gathering; because he could think of most of them
individually, knowing their names, homes, and circumstances; and he could
marvel a little at the spirit that had brought them out, on a foggy night, to
hear him talk about Mozart. Surely he was not wrong, at such a moment, in
thinking that he was accomplishing some kind of good in Browdley, that his
years of persistence were bearing fruit after all? And he felt, as deeply as
he had ever felt in the pulpit, inspired by a passionate desire to give these
few youngsters something adequate to their degree of needing and wanting. The
whole world stretched out beyond Browdley, a world they might and probably
would never see; could he not show them an inner world of beauty, visible to
all whose eyes were attuned to it? He thought then, quite suddenly and with
an odd sensation of mind- wandering: These walls would look better with a few
pictures—why not some of those coloured reproductions of Italian
primitives,