But the morrow’s sermon was again forgotten. He had remembered his boy in the air. The graceless lad whom he had flogged more than once in that very room, who had done little good at Marlborough, who had preferred a stool in a stockbroker’s office to the University, was now a superman, a veritable god in a machine. A week ago he had been to Buckingham Palace to be decorated by the King for an act of incredible daring. His name was great in the hearts of his countrymen. This lad not yet twenty, whom wild horses would not have dragged through the fourth Æneid, had made the name of Perry-Hennington ring throughout the empire. From this amazing Charley in his biplane, it was only a step in the father’s mind to honest Dick and the wardroom of the _Poseidon_. The vicar recalled with a little thrill of pride how Dick’s grandfather, the admiral, had always said that the boy was “a thorough Hennington,” the highest compliment the stout old sea dog had it in his power to pay him or any other human being. And then from Dick with his wide blue eyes, his square, fighting face and his nerves of steel the thoughts of the father flew to Tom, his eldest boy, the high-strung, nervous fellow, the Trinity prize man with the first-class brain. Tom had left not only a lucrative practice and brilliant prospects at the Bar, but also a delicate wife and three young children in order to spend the winter in the trenches of the Ypres salient. Moreover, he had “stuck it” without a murmur of complaint, although he was far too exact a thinker ever to have had any illusions in regard to the nature of war, and although this particular war defied the human imagination to conceive its horror. Yes, after all, Tom was the most wonderful of the three. Nature had not meant him for a soldier, the hypersensitive, overstrung lad who would faint over a cut finger, who had loathed cricket and football, or anything violent, who in years of manhood had had an almost fanatical distrust of the military mind. Some special grace had helped him to endure the bestiality of Flanders. From the thought of the three splendid sons God had given him the mind of the vicar turned to their begetter. He was only just sixty, he enjoyed rude health except for a touch of rheumatism now and again, yet here he was in a Sussex village supervising parish matters and preaching to women and old men. At last, with a jerk of impatience that was half despair, he suddenly withdrew his head from the intoxicating sun, the cool, scented wind of early June. “I’ll see the Bishop, that’s what I’ll do,” he muttered as he did so. But as he sat down once more at his writing table before the accusing page, he remembered that he had seen the Bishop several times already. And the Bishop’s counsel had been ever the same. Let him do the duty next him. His place was with his flock. Let him labor in his vocation, the only work for which one of his sort was really qualified.