Walking with a slow, regular pace, he left the native quarter, and taking a tram, got out on the road below the bungalow where Hartley’s servant waited in the veranda.

“Thy Sahib has cursed thy beard and thine age, and says that he will replace thee with a younger man if thy dealings in the Bazaar are of such long duration.”

“Peace, owl,” said Shiraz.  “The Sahib can no more travel without my assistance than a babe of one day without his mother.  Presently, when the Sahib has drunk a peg, he will return to reason.”

“The Sahib is not within; he has but now gone out once more, asking from my Sahib for the loan of a prayer-book.  Doubtless, there is a Tamasha at the ‘Kerfedril,’ and Coryndon Sahib goes thither to pray.”

“I shall place the buttons in his shirt, and recover an eight-anna piece from the floor, which the master dropped yesterday, to deliver to him when he shall return.  Seek to be honest in thy youth, my son, for in later life it will repay thee.”

Hartley’s boy had not been mistaken when he heard Coryndon ask for a prayer-book and saw him go out on foot.  The small persistent bell outside St. Jude’s Church was ringing with desperate energy to collect any worshippers who might feel inclined to assemble there for evensong, and the worshippers when collected under the tin roof numbered nearly a dozen.

It was a bare, barn-like Church, for the wealth of the Cantonment had flowed in the direction of the Cathedral.  The punkah mats flapped languidly, and the lower part of the church was dark, only the chancel being lighted with ungainly punkah-proof lamps, and the two altar candles that threw their gleam on a plain gold cross, guttered in the heat.  A strip of cocoa-nut matting lay along the aisle, and the chancel and altar steps were covered in sad, faded red.  The organist did not attend except on Sundays or Feast Days, and the service was plain, conducted throughout by the Rev. Francis Heath.

Coryndon took a seat about half-way up the nave, and when Heath came into the church, he watched him with interest.  He liked to watch a man, whom it was his business to study, without being disturbed, and Heath’s face in profile, as he knelt at the reading desk, or in full sight as he stood to read the lesson, attracted the fixed gaze of, at least, one member of the small congregation.  There was no sermon and the service was short, and as he sat quietly in his place, Coryndon wondered what frenzied moment of fear or despair could have driven this man into the company of Joicey and Mrs. Draycott Wilder, unconscious perhaps of their connection with him, but linked nevertheless by an invisible thread that wound around them all.

Beyond the fact that he had seen Mrs. Wilder, he had not taken her under the close observation of his mental microscope.  She stood on one side until such time as he should have need to probe into her reasons for silence, and he wondered if Hartley was right, and if, by chance, the earnest face of the clergyman, with its burning, stricken eyes, had appealed to her sympathy.  Could it be so, he asked himself once or twice, but the immediate question was the one that Coryndon gave his mind to answer, and just then he was forming an impression of the Rev. Francis Heath.