Wedekind’s was Anglo-Catholic and in a state of perpetual guerrilla warfare with the Bishop. But Mr. Cameron, the secretary of the Knype Hill Conservative Club, was a Roman Catholic convert, and his children were in the thick of the Roman Catholic literary movement. They were said to have a parrot which they were teaching to say “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.” In effect, no one of any standing remained true to St. Athelstan’s, except Miss Mayfill, of The Grange. Most of Miss Mayfill’s money was bequeathed to the Church—so she said; meanwhile, she had never been known to put more than sixpence in the collection bag, and she seemed likely to go on living for ever.

The first ten minutes of breakfast passed in complete silence. Dorothy was trying to summon up courage to speak—obviously she had got to start some kind of conversation before raising the money question—but her father was not an easy man with whom to make small talk. At times he would fall into such deep fits of abstraction that you could hardly get him to listen to you; at other times he was all too attentive, listened carefully to what you said and then pointed out, rather wearily, that it was not worth saying. Polite platitudes—the weather, and so forth—generally moved him to sarcasm. Nevertheless, Dorothy decided to try the weather first.

“It’s a funny kind of day, isn’t it?” she said—aware, even as she made it, of the inanity of this remark.

“What is funny?” inquired the Rector.

“Well, I mean, it was so cold and misty this morning, and now the sun’s come out and it’s turned quite fine.”

“Is there anything particularly funny about that?”

That was no good, obviously. He must have had bad news, she thought. She tried again.

“I do wish you’d come out and have a look at the things in the back garden some time, Father. The runner beans are doing so splendidly! The pods are going to be over a foot long. I’m going to keep all the best of them for the Harvest Festival, of course. I thought it would look so nice if we decorated the pulpit with festoons of runner beans and a few tomatoes hanging in among them.”

This was a faux pas. The Rector looked up from his plate with an expression of profound distaste.

“My dear Dorothy,” he said sharply, “Is it necessary to begin worrying me about the Harvest Festival already?”

“I’m sorry, Father!” said Dorothy, disconcerted. “I didn’t mean to worry you. I just thought—”

“Do you suppose,” proceeded the Rector, “it is any pleasure to me to have to preach my sermon among festoons of runner beans? I am not a greengrocer. It quite puts me off my breakfast to think of it. When is the wretched thing due to happen?”

“It’s September the sixteenth, Father.”

“That’s nearly a month hence. For Heaven’s sake let me forget it a little longer! I suppose we must have this ridiculous business once a year to tickle the vanity of every amateur gardener in the parish. But don’t let’s think of it more than is absolutely necessary.”

The Rector had, as Dorothy ought to have remembered, a perfect abhorrence of Harvest Festivals. He had even lost a valuable parishioner—a Mr. Toagis, a surly retired market gardener—through his dislike, as he said, of seeing his church dressed up to imitate a coster’s stall. Mr. Toagis, anima naturaliter Nonconformistica, had been kept “Church” solely by the privilege, at Harvest Festival time, of decorating the side altar with a sort of Stonehenge composed of gigantic vegetable marrows. The previous summer he had succeeded in growing a perfect leviathan of a pumpkin, a fiery red thing so enormous that it took two men to lift it. This monstrous object had been placed in the chancel, where it dwarfed the altar and took all the colour out of the east window. In no matter what part of the church you were standing, the pumpkin, as the saying goes, hit you in the eye. Mr.