This was one of the houses the clergyman visited occasionally. Mrs. Durant, as part of her regulation, had brought up all her sons in the Church. Not that she had any religion. Only, it was what she was used to. Mr. Durant was without religion. He read the fervently evangelical Life of John Wesley with a curious pleasure, getting from it a satisfaction as from the warmth of the fire, or a glass of brandy. But he cared no more about John Wesley, in fact, than about John Milton, of whom he had never heard.

Mrs. Durant took her chair to the table.

“I don’t feel like eating,” she sighed.

“Why—aren’t you well·” asked the clergyman, patronising.

“It isn’t that,” she sighed. She sat with shut, straight mouth. “I don’t know what’s going to become of us.”

But the clergyman had ground himself down so long that he could not easily sympathise.

“Have you any trouble·” he asked.

“Ay, have I any trouble!” cried the elderly woman. “I shall end my days in the workhouse.”

The minister waited unmoved. What could she know of poverty in her little house of plenty!

“I hope not,” he said.

“And the one lad as I wanted to keep by me—” she lamented.

The minister listened without sympathy, quite neutral.

“And the lad as would have been a support to my old age! What is going to become of us·” she said.

The clergyman, justly, did not believe in the cry of poverty, but wondered what had become of the son.

“Has anything happened to Alfred·” he asked.

“We’ve got word he’s gone for a Queen’s sailor,” she said sharply.

“He has joined the Navy!” exclaimed Mr. Lindley. “I think he could scarcely have done better—to serve his Queen and country on the sea...”

“He is wanted to serve me,”she cried. “And I wanted my lad at home.”

Alfred was her baby, her last, whom she had allowed herself the luxury of spoiling.

“You will miss him,” said Mr. Lindley, “that is certain. But this is no regrettable step for him to have taken—on the contrary.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Mr. Lindley,” she replied tartly. “Do you think I want my lad climbing ropes at another man’s bidding, like a monkey—”

“There is no dishonour, surely, in serving in the Navy·”

“Dishonour this dishonour that,” cried the angry old woman. “He goes and makes a slave of himself, and he’ll rue it.”

Her angry, scornful impatience nettled the clergyman, and silenced him for some moments.

“I do not see,” he retorted at last, white at the gills and inadequate, “that the Queen’s service is any more to be called slavery than working in a mine.”

“At home he was at home, and his own master. I know he’ll find a difference.”

“It may be the making of him,” said the clergyman. “It will take him away from bad companionship and drink.”

Some of the Durants’ sons were notorious drinkers, and Alfred was not quite steady.