Page:The council of seven.djvu/133

 the patient should come down to luncheon and eat roast beef. "Of course, my dear, he ought to stay in bed until to-morrow, but Dr. Evans is a weak man so he's sure to get round him. However, we mustn't let that keep us from church."

For church they set out accordingly twenty minutes before the doctor was due; and Lady Elizabeth, helped by stout boots, a short skirt, and an ebony cane, walked an honest three quarters of a mile across the beautiful park with a practical strength of spirit that Helen could but admire. Again it might have been her own mother in her own home, except that Lady Elizabeth was older than her mother by twenty years.

Sustained by the hope of John at luncheon, Helen did not find the service, although in itself decidedly uninspired, so hard to bear as otherwise it might have been. She hoped she was not guilty of the sin known to the Greeks as hubris, but she could not kill a feeling that John and she lived in another time, another mental atmosphere, another world. This handful of bovine rustics, stiff and uncomfortable in their Sunday clothes, listening vacantly to a string of clichés which they didn't comprehend and for which they would have been none the better had they been able to do so, how pathetic they were! And the "pi-jaw" delivered falsetto in the high voice known to Victorian days as an appanage of "the Oxford manner," how incongruous, how outworn it was!

The church itself, however, was another affair. It