Was he coming? And she could fret herself over being two minutes late! Good women were really quite incomprehensible, especially in India, where they did so little to deserve the name. The hundred or so, for instance, in church at that present moment--did they do an atom more--no! not half so much as he did--for the good of the world around them, or the Empire--except perhaps in supplying it with sons! Yet there they would be, quite satisfied with themselves. The thought attracted him. He was in no hurry himself to do the thing he knew he must do--in fact, any delay was welcome--so he turned into the church compound also, and stood decorously at the door till the Absolution, which was being given, was over, before slipping into the nearest seat, next to a very stout old lady whose only claim to be considered even a Eurasian was her bonnet. But as he had stood for those brief moments looking over the heads of the bowed congregation, he had noticed, with a sense of the humour of the thing, that the percentage of dark blood in the worshippers could be very fairly gauged by their distance from the white robes of the choir boys! The good lady beside him, however, ended the scale of colour, for the native Christian, _pur et simple_, was, of course, absorbed by the Mission churches. And the non-Christian native? There was no sign of him either. No sound of him, no thought even of him from beginning to end! Jack Raymond stood up decorously, and sat down decorously, knelt decorously, and listened decorously, with a sense of unreality, a sense of dislocation from his surroundings, that was not much less keen than Chris Davenant's had been when he listened to the 'Society for the General Good of Peoples' at Hâfiz Ahmad's house. The sermon--a good one in its way--might have been preached in a London suburb, save for this, that beyond a little perfunctory solacing of Eurasian paupers, there was none of the active attempt to carry words into deeds which would have existed in the listeners of a suburban congregation. Absolutely, utterly, none. Not one woman there knew as much as he, the idler, of the hard poverty-stricken lives of the people. Yet these very women, when they went home, would feel themselves accursed as worldlings if they did not district-visit or join the Charity Organisation! These considerations did not improve one listener's temper. On the contrary, they increased his desire for delay; for, having already warned Sir George that, in his opinion, the city was more unstable than authority seemed to think, he washed his hands of that responsibility. All he had to do, therefore, was to get and pay for this paper, if needful, and so prevent its being made use of against the Government--prevent its being a worry to--to Jerry's mother!