She must have knelt and stood mechanically, for the service was ended.  The pulpit was occupied by an elderly uninteresting-looking man with a troublesome cough.  But one sentence he had let fall had gripped her attention.  For a moment she could not remember it, and then it came to her:  “All Roads lead to Calvary.”  It struck her as rather good.  Perhaps he was going to be worth listening to.  “To all of us, sooner or later,” he was saying, “comes a choosing of two ways:  either the road leading to success, the gratification of desires, the honour and approval of our fellow-men—­or the path to Calvary.”

And then he had wandered off into a maze of detail.  The tradesman, dreaming perhaps of becoming a Whiteley, having to choose whether to go forward or remain for all time in the little shop.  The statesman—­should he abide by the faith that is in him and suffer loss of popularity, or renounce his God and enter the Cabinet?  The artist, the writer, the mere labourer—­there were too many of them.  A few well-chosen examples would have sufficed.  And then that irritating cough!

And yet every now and then he would be arresting.  In his prime, Joan felt, he must have been a great preacher.  Even now, decrepit and wheezy, he was capable of flashes of magnetism, of eloquence.  The passage where he pictured the Garden of Gethsemane.  The fair Jerusalem, only hidden from us by the shadows.  So easy to return to.  Its soft lights shining through the trees, beckoning to us; its mingled voices stealing to us through the silence, whispering to us of its well-remembered ways, its pleasant places, its open doorways, friends and loved ones waiting for us.  And above, the rock-strewn Calvary:  and crowning its summit, clear against the starlit sky, the cold, dark cross.  “Not perhaps to us the bleeding hands and feet, but to all the bitter tears.  Our Calvary may be a very little hill compared with the mountains where Prometheus suffered, but to us it is steep and lonely.”

There he should have stopped.  It would have been a good note on which to finish.  But it seemed there was another point he wished to make.  Even to the sinner Calvary calls.  To Judas—­even to him the gates of the life-giving Garden of Gethsemane had not been closed.  “With his thirty pieces of silver he could have stolen away.  In some distant crowded city of the Roman Empire have lived unknown, forgotten.  Life still had its pleasures, its rewards.  To him also had been given the choice.  The thirty pieces of silver that had meant so much to him!  He flings them at the feet of his tempters.  They would not take them back.  He rushes out and hangs himself.  Shame and death.  With his own hands he will build his own cross, none to help him.  He, too—­even Judas, climbs his Calvary.  Enters into the fellowship of those who through all ages have trod its stony pathway.”

Joan waited till the last of the congregation had disappeared, and then joined the little pew-opener who was waiting to close the doors.  Joan asked her what she had thought of the sermon, but Mary Stopperton, being a little deaf, had not heard it.