‘You girls ought to come along,’ Miss Docker would call to the inmates of the Sundown Home. ‘Do you good. Accepting asylum from them, too, at a nominal rate.’

But the old ladies sniggered, and no longer bothered to hide it. Those who were left, that is, for some had discovered nieces willing to take them, while others had simply died of something.

‘Why don’t you give us a trial, Mrs Custance?’ Miss Docker invited from the roadside. ‘You can show appreciation of your blessings in any shape of church.’

‘I must,’ Mrs Custance answered, and smiled.

But didn’t.

‘Are we all so intellectual, and not intelligent enough, Mr Lickiss?’ Miss Docker asked, at the fence.

When she had gone Mr Lickiss left off cleaning the gutter. He struck his head over the hedge, and answered an invisible wife:

‘Yes. It was Her!’

No one more than Mr Wakeman himself was conscious of his failure in his duty towards God, but was unable to discuss the situation with Miss Docker or anybody else. He was scourged by the knowledge, so much so that his wife borrowed a pamphlet on dietetics.

As for the rector, he continued to examine his heart. He walked abroad, no longer amongst his parishioners, hoping rather that obscurity would illuminate his empty mind, discovering in a distant corner some treasure of wisdom he might offer publicly to his Lord. In his stout, army boots, Mr Wakeman was seen to walk. His greenish suit hung looser than before. It was the time of year of black wattles, and he walked in the grove of black wattles. Hoping, by prayer. But leaned his head at last against a trunk, which was oozing those drops of transparent gum.

On a morning in early spring, just such a morning when he should have been wearing Miss Docker’s balaclava cap, he asked his wife, who had formed the habit of walking across to the vestry with him:

‘How many this morning, Alice?’

Mrs Wakeman peeped out, unseen; she had learnt to do it.

‘Oh, the Furzes, and the Bleekers,’ she said. ‘And four or five children.’

‘Oh,’ she added. ‘Miss Docker is there.’

Presently the rector knelt to ask forgiveness for that personal insufficiency which had finally dispersed his flock, while his wife’s rather muscular calves hurried her round to the west door, to take her place amongst the congregation.

As he conducted the service, nobody could have denied the rector his dignity or manliness. No one would have noticed anything amiss.

Miss Docker, naturally, led the responses.

‘O Lord have mercy on us!’ She lifted her jaw in professional supplication.

‘Amen.’ And again: ‘Amen.’ Miss Docker punctuated in stops of lead.

The Furzes and the Bleekers followed, all four notoriously deaf, asking one another to explain the drift, the several children sniffled and whispered, whispered and sniffled, into the pages of their books, the disused organ creaked, in which the borer was working overtime. Only the rector’s wife was silent, attempting to prolong her prayer.