From the gallery, whither they were banished four times a year on Communion Sundays, the children used to lean forward with awe in their hearts, and in their throats a choking sense of their father’s dignity. Sholto always led the other elders in their solemn progress through the napkin-decked body of the church to the choir rails. And there, after the grave order of the Scottish service, they partook of the broken bread from Dr. Ranken’s thin hands before they dispensed it, pew by pew, to the waiting congregation.

The children of course had all been baptized at these same choir rails. They were known individually to each member, and every detail of the building was as familiar to them as the interior of their nursery. How well Joanna knew the pattern of the coloured, diamond-shaped panes in the high rectangular windows: there were two yellow diamonds, then a blue, then two more yellow, and a red square at each corner. Then there was the dark, highly varnished pulpit with its canopy of mahogany spires. Often she had half hoped, half feared that the great bristling lid would fall by its own weight on Dr. Ranken, extinguishing him in the middle of his sermon like a jack-in-the-box. Yet it remained poised; and certainly its intricacies provided a maze in which a child’s imagination could run riot. It was one of Joanna’s fantasies to picture herself and her cousin Gerald (conveniently reduced to scale) playing a madly amorous, yet innocent game of hide-and-seek amid the wilds of this Gothic forest.

But a period of changes had come in which Sholto was prime mover, and the canopy had been done away with. At the same time offertory bags were substituted for the plates at the door, a paid quartette was added to the choir, the congregation was requested (with very partial success) to join in the Lord’s Prayer, and the whole church was upholstered in blue-grey repp, instead of in crimson as formerly.

Sholto had always advocated what he called “a bright service.” “The only way to keep a hold on our young people!” he would say breezily in the face of conservatism. Certainly, at the time of his death the decoration of St. Jude’s vied with its service in sprightliness. With its white and pale blue paint, its gilding, and its palm trees in niches, it resembled a Casino rather than a church. And the paid vocalists never for one moment allowed it to be forgotten that they were paid. A stranger could have picked them out as they stood shoulder to shoulder in the van of the choir – the contralto as manful and almost as moustachioed as the bass – singing the praises of God right into the faces of those who were fortunate enough to occupy the front pews.