Mullins would notice the item for a hundred dollars due on fire
insurance and would say; as a business man, that surely that couldn't
be fire insurance, and the Dean would say surely not, and change it:
and Mullins would say surely there couldn't be fifty dollars for
taxes, because there weren't any taxes, and the Dean would admit that
of course it couldn't be for the taxes. In fact, the truth is that
the Dean's figures were badly mixed, and the fault lay indubitably
with the mathematical professor of two generations back.

It was always Mullins's intention some day to look into the finances
of the church, the more so as his father had been with Dean Drone at
the little Anglican college with the cricket ground. But he was a
busy man. As he explained to the rector himself, the banking business
nowadays is getting to be such that a banker can hardly call even his
Sunday mornings his own. Certainly Henry Mullins could not. They
belonged largely to Smith's Hotel, and during the fishing season they
belonged away down the lake, so far away that practically no one,
unless it was George Duff of the Commercial Bank, could see them.

But to think that all this trouble had come through the building of
the new church.

That was the bitterness of it.

For the twenty-five years that Rural Dean Drone had preached in the
little stone church, it had been his one aim, as he often put it in
his sermons, to rear a larger Ark in Gideon. His one hope had been to
set up a greater Evidence, or, very simply stated, to kindle a
Brighter Beacon.