But, curiously enough, it was not the praying but the fighting Elijah that Wiggie loved best. The pale, diffident young man saw himself as the fierce, tanned herald of woe, and made others see him as such, too. It was glorious to curse kings, run before chariots and slay false prophets by the hundred! He felt the inspired words hot on his lips, the racing blood in his veins, the warm dust spurned by his swift feet. In the great “hammer” solo he worked to such a pitch of intensity, beating out the last iron strokes of the _più lento_ so strongly that the audience almost winced beneath his power, and the hatchet-faced man shook like a whippet on leash, uttering sharp little sounds remarkably like oaths. But after that--after the Reproach to Ahab--Elijah sank back into Wigmore, quivering under the virulent words of the venomous Queen as if they had been live blades. The Queen was a strenuous member of the Society, with a bludgeon air that reminded him of Harriet, and he shrank before her condemnation as he had shrunk many a time under Harriet’s scorn. The tired protest under the juniper-tree, in face of the fresh task--“Oh, Lord, I have laboured in vain! Yea, I have spent my strength, have spent my strength for naught. O that I now might die!” brought the tears chasing down Hamer’s cheeks, but it was Wiggie, not Elijah, who brought them there, though he did not know it. It was Wiggie’s own cry from a desolate heart and an almost finished body, looking into a future void of the one hope that had kept him alive for long--the terrible cry of the human, seeing the strength of the flesh break, taking the strength of the soul with it. He was in the wilderness, and no God could set his feet for Horeb. But the pitiful personal note was felt, if not recognised, bringing the Angel to “O Rest in the Lord” with a style very different from her famous “Sing me to Sleep” imitation, and aweing the basses to an unwonted mellowness of mumbling in the tender balm of “He that shall Endure to the End.” And at the close of it, the quiet figure on Hamer’s chair lifted his eyes and smiled the same whimsical smile at the strangers in the front pew. The man with the sad eyes smiled also. The leashed whippet sank back and was still. It was over at last, the last brave spurt of confidence and hope, the swirl of the final choruses, followed by the stillness of a prayer; and then the organ burst out again, the doors flew open, the sardine-box unpacked itself and stretched. A hum of wonder was running through the congregation. _Who_ was the collapsed young man with the perfect voice at least six sizes too big for him? Quite extraordinarily good, and with a great look of--something like “Quagga”--the man who was commanded to Windsor last month--but of course they all knew that he was nothing more exciting than the Shaws’ last, unthrottled-off pal.