“Fool! Steggles sings in the choir, too. There may be dirty work after the service.”
“What absolute rot!”
“Is it?” said young Bingo. “Well, let me tell you that in Jenny, the Girl Jockey , the villain kidnapped the boy who was to ride the favourite the night before the big race, and he was the only one who understood and could control the horse, and if the heroine hadn’t dressed up in riding things and—”
“Oh, all right, all right. But, if there’s any danger, it seems to me the simplest thing would be for Harold not to turn out on Sunday evening.”
“He must turn out. You seem to think the infernal kid is a monument of rectitude, beloved by all. He’s got the shakiest reputation of any kid in the village. His name is as near being mud as it can jolly well stick. He’s played hookey from the choir so often that the vicar told him, if one more thing happened, he would fire him out. Nice chumps we should look if he was scratched the night before the race!”
Well, of course, that being so, there was nothing for it but to toddle along.
There’s something about evening service in a country church that makes a fellow feel drowsy and peaceful. Sort of end-of-a-perfect-day feeling. Old Heppenstall was up in the pulpit, and he has a kind of regular, bleating delivery that assists thought. They had left the door open, and the air was full of a mixed scent of trees and honeysuckle and mildew and villagers’ Sunday clothes. As far as the eye could reach, you could see farmers propped up in restful attitudes, breathing heavily; and the children in the congregation who had fidgeted during the earlier part of the proceedings were now lying back in a surfeited sort of coma. The last rays of the setting sun shone through the stained-glass windows, birds