The first Sunday of Will’s home-coming, nothing had been said about chapel. That, his elders thought, might be still a sore subject with the boy whose resentment at sacrificing his buttons on the altar had driven him “furrin.” Still more delicate was the theological position into which the couple themselves had gradually drifted, and of which they now—before a spectator and critic—grew uneasily conscious. Martha’s Ecclesia in Long Bradmarsh having collapsed almost as soon as she had been converted to it, she had no meeting-house to go to, and, almost simultaneously, Caleb, whose farm-wagons had recently been shifted to the new “looker’s” headquarters, ceased to attend his Chipstone Chapel. This was partly to keep his wife company of a Sunday, partly because so many miles there and back was getting too much for his legs. In consequence the pair had arrived by compromise at a Sunday ritual of their own, a sort of Peculiar Christadelphianism, and Uncle Lilliwhyte, who never entered any of the many houses of God—it was popularly supposed he would not or could not remove his gay-stringed beaver—would often loiter outside Frog Farm in Church hours, listening to their loudly trolled and hybrid hymnology in a sort of pious eavesdropping. That was Uncle Lilliwhyte’s individual contribution to the chaos of creeds that reigned in Bradmarsh. But even this minimum of religion was denied the honest snake-seller when Will returned. The first Sunday, Caleb and Martha held their services furtively in their hermetically sealed bedroom, hardly daring to hum what they had so lustily intoned: by a common instinct they shrank from obtruding their departure from that straitness of doctrine in which Will had been reared. They were indeed secretly relieved that he made no reference to religion, nor seemed to expect them to go to the old chapel, nor even noted the Sundayness of the dishes that Martha served up with the same careful everyday air with which Caleb consumed them. They were equally relieved, however, that he did not go out rabbiting on the holy day with his new pet ferrets. “Oi’ve known some as dedn’t consider that work,” said Caleb, as they discussed this dread possibility. “But to my thinkin’, if ye goo out with a spade, ye might as well be ploughin’.”