Hamer and his wife were in a convenient position for admiring both their own chairs and their daughter’s head through the palms. Helwise was at the extreme end of a stall under the reading-desk, just where her wandering soprano would sail straight into Wiggie’s sensitive ear. There was a pretty colour in her delicate cheeks. She had just been having words with the Vicar about the necessity of providing his best silk drawing-room cushions for the unyielding oak seats of Hamer’s property. Harriet was in the altos. If you are not quite sure whether you possess a voice or not, they always shove you into the altos, or else into that last refuge of the destitute--the second trebles. Bluecaster was talking to Lanty in the porch when a long gray car, covered with mud, slid up to the gate, setting down a young man, thin and eager-looking, and an older one, broad-shouldered and dark, with sad eyes. They were evidently strangers, from the way they looked about them, and in the porch the thin man appealed for information. “I understand there is to be a performance of the ‘Elijah,’ this afternoon. Shall we find seats, do you think? We’ve come some distance to hear a friend sing.” Bluecaster took them in tow and persuaded the verger to put them in the Vicar’s pew in front, the Vicar’s wife being securely jammed in the chancel sardine-box. The strangers looked tired, as if they had come far, and they talked to each other in little, snapped-off, troubled sentences. Once, the hatchet-faced man rose as if set on an errand, but the big man dragged him down again. His voice was low, but singularly penetrating, on account of its curious inflections. “It’s no good. You can’t make a fuss, with this crowd. He would never forgive us. Sit still, man, and trust to Heaven. You’ll have the congregation thinking we’re the bailiffs!” In the vestry, the Bluecaster schoolmaster, an excitable little man with a beat like an aeroplane propeller, was giving the last instructions to his soloists. The Obadiah was making quite sure of his moustache in the clerical looking-glass, while the Angel, in the very latest of earthly fashions, followed Wiggie round the room, declaiming: “Elijah! Get thee hence, Elijah!” with playful fervour. The Widow looked out of the window, rather sad and pale, and to her Wiggie drifted by degrees. She was young and evidently very nervous, and because she had blue eyes rather like Dandy’s, he wanted to speak to her; so he opened his neat, leather-bound copy, asking how she meant to take a certain phrase. As he closed it again, she caught the name on the cover, and gave a little cry, putting out her hand. “It _was_! I knew it was! I heard you----” Wiggie grabbed the hand and squeezed it, he was so anxious to stop her. The conductor looked round hurriedly.