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As he entered with Sir Harry, the Rev. Clement Vyell swung round upon him eagerly, but paused with a just perceptible start at sight of his unclerical garb.

“Let me introduce you, Clem. This is Mr. Flood.”

Parson Jack bowed, and let his eyes travel around the church, which he had often enough pitied, but of which he now for the first time felt ashamed.

“We’re in a sad mess, I’m afraid,” he muttered.

“It’s most interesting, nevertheless,” Clement Vyell answered. He was a thin-faced youth with a high pedagogic voice. “Better a church in this condition than one restored out of all whooping–though I read on the box yonder that you are collecting towards a restoration.”

Parson Jack blushed hotly.

“You have made a start, eh? What are your funds in hand?”

“Two pounds four shillings–as yet.”

Sir Harry laughed outright; and after a moment Parson Jack laughed too– he could not help it. But Clement Vyell frowned, having no sense of humour.

“I patch it up, you know–after a fashion.” Parson Jack’s tone was humble enough and propitiatory; nevertheless, he glanced at his handiwork with something like pride. “The windows, for instance–“

The younger man turned with a shudder. “I suppose now,” he said abruptly, staring up at an arch connecting the choir-stalls with the southern transept, “this bit of Norman work will be as old as anything you have?”

That it was Norman came as news to Parson Jack. He, too, stared up at it, resting a palm on a crumbling bench-end.

“Well,” said he ingenuously, “I’m no judge of these things, you know; but I always supposed the tower was the oldest bit.”

He broke off in confusion–not at his speech, but because Clement Vyell’s eyes were resting on the back of his hand, which shook with a tell-tale palsy.

“The tower,” said the young man icily, “is Perpendicular, and later than 1412, at all events, when a former belfry fell in, destroyed the nave, and cracked the pavement, as you see. All this is matter of record, as you may learn, sir, from the books which, I feel sure, my uncle will be pleased to lend you. I need not ask, perhaps, if in the course of your–ah–excavations you have come on any traces of the original pre-Augustine Oratory, or of the conventual buildings which existed here till, we are told, the middle of the thirteenth century.”

He turned away, obviously expecting no answer, addressed himself henceforward to Sir Harry, and ignored Parson Jack, who followed him abashed, yet secretly burning to hear more, and wondering where all this knowledge could be obtained.

“But it is inconceivable!” Clement Vyell protested to his uncle, half an hour later, as they rode back towards Carwithiel. “The man has had the cure of that parish for–how long, do you say?–twenty-five years, and has never had the curiosity to discover the most rudimentary facts in its history.”

“A hard case,” assented Sir Harry. “He lifts his elbow, too.”

“Eh?”

“Drinks.” Sir Harry illustrated the idiom, lifting an imaginary glass to his mouth. “Oh, it’s notorious. But what the deuce can we do? Kick him out?–not so easy; and, besides, he’d die under a hedge. You’re hard on him, Clem. He has his notions of duty. Why”–the Baronet laughed–“I’ve seen him on the roof with a tar-bucket, caulking the leaks for dear life. He’s a gentleman, too.”

Clement Vyell tightened his lips and rode on in silence.

Left alone, Parson Jack stared around his church. His repairs, in which he had taken pride before now, seemed nakedly, hideously mean at this moment. But a new sense fought with his dejection–a sense altogether new to him–that his church had a history, a meaning into which he had never penetrated. The aisles seemed to expand, the chancel to reach up into a distance in which space and time were confused; and, following it, his eye rested on a patch of colour in the east window between the wooden tablets of the Law–a cluster of fragments of stained glass, rescued by some former vicar and set amid the clear panes–the legs and scarlet robe of a saint, an angel’s wing, a broken legend on a scroll, part of a coat-of-arms, azure with a fesse,–wavy of gold–all thrown together as by a kaleidoscope gone mad. Each of these scraps had once a meaning: so this church held meanings, too long ignored by him, partly intelligible yet, soon to be mixed inextricably in a common downfall. For Clement Vyell might be wise in the history of architecture, but his eye had not read the one plain warning which stared a common workman in the face–that the days of this building were surely numbered, and were probably few.