Now there arose a second reason for squeezing into an already overcrowded church.  The persuasive and gentle eloquence of Mr. Sainway operated like a charm upon those accustomed only to the higher and dryer styles of preaching, and for a time the other churches of the town were thinned of their sitters.

At this point in the nineteenth century the sermon was the sole reason for churchgoing amongst a vast body of religious people.  The liturgy was a formal preliminary, which, like the Royal proclamation in a court of assize, had to be got through before the real interest began; and on reaching home the question was simply:  Who preached, and how did he handle his subject?  Even had an archbishop officiated in the service proper nobody would have cared much about what was said or sung.  People who had formerly attended in the morning only began to go in the evening, and even to the special addresses in the afternoon.

One day when Captain Maumbry entered his wife’s drawing-room, filled with hired furniture, she thought he was somebody else, for he had not come upstairs humming the most catching air afloat in musical circles or in his usual careless way.

‘What’s the matter, Jack?’ she said without looking up from a note she was writing.

‘Well—­not much, that I know.’

‘O, but there is,’ she murmured as she wrote.

’Why—­this cursed new lath in a sheet—­I mean the new parson!  He wants us to stop the band-playing on Sunday afternoons.’

Laura looked up aghast.

’Why, it is the one thing that enables the few rational beings hereabouts to keep alive from Saturday to Monday!’

’He says all the town flock to the music and don’t come to the service, and that the pieces played are profane, or mundane, or inane, or something—­not what ought to be played on Sunday.  Of course ’tis Lautmann who settles those things.’

Lautmann was the bandmaster.

The barrack-green on Sunday afternoons had, indeed, become the promenade of a great many townspeople cheerfully inclined, many even of those who attended in the morning at Mr. Sainway’s service; and little boys who ought to have been listening to the curate’s afternoon lecture were too often seen rolling upon the grass and making faces behind the more dignified listeners.

Laura heard no more about the matter, however, for two or three weeks, when suddenly remembering it she asked her husband if any further objections had been raised.

’O—­Mr. Sainway.  I forgot to tell you.  I’ve made his acquaintance.  He is not a bad sort of man.’

Laura asked if either Maumbry or some others of the officers did not give the presumptuous curate a good setting down for his interference.

‘O well—­we’ve forgotten that.  He’s a stunning preacher, they tell me.’

The acquaintance developed apparently, for the Captain said to her a little later on, ’There’s a good deal in Sainway’s argument about having no band on Sunday afternoons.  After all, it is close to his church.  But he doesn’t press his objections unduly.’