“Just so,” said Mr. Gray, and he added with a little chuckle of enjoyment, “I like it—­I like it.  We need it, I assure you.  There is no question about that.  Why, Winnie, not a bit of the fowl?  You are losing your appetite, child.  Yes, sir, we need to be stirred up.  If there is anything I believe in, it is sincerity.  But now, don’t you think, Mr. Bond, that you put it just a little grain too stiff?”

“In what way, Mr. Gray?”

“Well, now, I say the Apostles’ Creed.  I know it by heart.  I don’t know how many hundreds of times I have said it.  It says itself.  Perhaps that is why I don’t always stop to think what it does say.  But I do not suppose there is a word in it that I do not believe.  Now if my mind happens to wander while I am, saying it—­if it happens, mind you—­”

“Father, Julia is waiting for Mr. Bond’s plate,” interposed Mrs. Gray softly from the other end of the table.

“I beg your pardon.”  Then, as the delinquent plate went to its destination, “If my mind happens to wander to some little matter of business, or something or other, while I say the Creed—­am I a hypocrite?”

The merchant propounded the question with a note of triumph, as though the bold-spoken minister were rather cornered now.  Mr. Bond answered respectfully, but with subdued amusement: 

“I think, Mr. Gray, that the Lord would recognize the absence of insincere intent, but that so far as worship goes, you might as well set some Tibetan prayer-wheels going.”

A gleam of enjoyment shot from Hubert’s eyes, and a laugh almost escaped him.

“Ah, just so—­just so!” said Mr. Gray, a little discomfited.  “But would it be better not to say it?”

“It would be better to mean it,” said Mr. Bond.

“He parries well,” thought Hubert.

“Winifred,” said Mrs. Gray, off whose smooth nature these discussions rolled harmlessly, “the music was very fine this morning.”

Winifred, who would have preferred almost any subject to this, cast an appealing glance at her mother, but it was unheeded.  She had hoped Mr. Bond would not recognize her as the singer.

Mrs. Gray went on:  “Mrs. Butterworth, who sits just the other side of the partition from us, you know, was quite carried away.  She looked volumes at me, but she just whispered ‘heavenly!’ She said after church she hoped you would come to her party next week and bring your songs.  You have such a gift, she said.”

And Mrs. Gray herself sighed religiously at the thought of Winnie’s “gift.”  Winnie could have sighed, too, but it was with torture.