“Don’t stop,” she whispered. “And mind your p’s and q’s,” she added. “You’re in a difficult position. And not all the eyes watching you are friendly.”!

“The Cyril Baptiste,” he answered, in a low, even, passionate voice, that he flung at her almost like a blow. “The atheist, the gaol bird, the pariah, the blasphemer, the anti-Christ. I’ve hoofs instead of feet. Shall I take off my boots and show them to you? I tuck my tail inside my coat. You can’t see my horns. I’ve cut them off close to my head. That’s why I wear my hair long: to hide the stumps.” She glanced round and lowered her voice. “They tell me,” she said, “that you’re a B.A.”

“You looked so young,” he answered. “I had always had the idea that it was up to the old people to put the world to rights—that all I had to do was to look after myself. It came to me suddenly while you were talking to me—I mean while I was reading you: that if you were worrying yourself about it, I’d got to come in, too—that it would be mean of me not to. It wasn’t like being preached to. It was somebody calling for help.” The striking of the old church clock recalled her to herself. But she had only a few minutes’ walk before her. Mary had given up her Church work. It included the cleaning, and she had found it beyond her failing strength. But she still lived in the tiny cottage behind its long strip of garden. The door yielded to Joan’s touch: it was seldom fast closed. And knowing Mary’s ways, she entered without knocking and pushed it to behind her, leaving it still ajar. It didn’t strike her as at all odd that a leader of a political party should ask her “if she minded” his being in Paris to attend a political conference. He was wearing a light grey suit and a blue tie. There was nothing about him, at that moment, suggesting that he was a leader of any sort. He might have been just any man, but for his eyes.