The proportion of men was far higher than in the former group, and they were curiously assorted. A few of them might have been Londoners, or at least town dwellers, but the majority wore a countryman’s working clothes. An exception to either kind was a middle-aged clergyman, but what every one of the men had in common was blindness.

The women were more diversified. Some were in town clothes quite unsuited to their surroundings; others were probably local. Among the latter only one girl was sighted, but the former group comprised half a dozen or so who could see and a number who, though blind, were not clumsy.

Coker, too, had been taking stock of the place.

“Rum sort of setup, this,” he remarked sotto voce to me. “Have you seen her yet?”

I shook my head, desolately aware that I had pinned more on the expectation of finding Josella there than I had admitted to myself.

“Funny thing,” he went on, “there’s practically none of the lot I took along with you—except that girl that’s carrying, up at the end there.”

“Has she recognized you?” I asked.

“I think so. I got a sort of dirty look from her.”

When the carrying and serving had been completed we took our own plates and found places at the table. There was nothing to complain of in the cooking or the food, and living out of cold cans for a week sharpens the appreciation, anyway. At the end of the meal there was a knocking on the table. The clergyman rose; he waited for silence before he spoke:

“My friends, it is fitting that at the end of another day we should renew our thanks to God for His great mercy in preserving us in the midst of such disaster. I will ask you all to pray that He may look with compassion upon those who still wander alone in darkness, and that it may please Him to guide their feet hither that we may succor them. Let us all beseech Him that we may survive the trials and tribulations that lie ahead in order that in His time and with His aid we may succeed in playing our part in the rebuilding of a better world to His greater glory.”

He bowed his head.

“Almighty and most merciful God ..

After the “Amen” he led a hymn. When that was finished the gathering sorted itself out into parties, each keeping touch with his neighbor, and four of the sighted girls led them out.

I lit a cigarette. Coker took one from me absent-mindedly, without making any comment. A girl came across to us.

“Will you help to clear up?” she asked. “Miss Durrant will be back soon, I expect.”

“Miss Durrant?” I repeated.

“She does the organizing,” she explained. “You’ll be able to fix things up with her.”

It was an hour later and almost dark when we heard that Miss Durrant had returned. We found her in a small, study-like room lit only by the light of two candles on the desk. I recognized her at once as the dark, thin-lipped woman who had spoken for the opposition at the meeting. For the moment all her attention was concentrated on Coker. Her expression was no more amiable than upon the former occasion.

“I am told,” she said coldly, regarding Coker as though he were some kind of silt, “I am told that you are the man who organized the raid on the University Building?”

Coker agreed, and waited.

‘Then I may as well tell you, once and for all, that in our community here we have no use for brutal methods, and no intention of tolerating them.”

Coker smiled slightly. He answered her in his best middle-class speech:

“It is a matter of viewpoint. Who is to judge who were the more brutal? Those who saw an immediate responsibility, and stayed—or those who saw a further responsibility, and cleared out?”

She continued to look hard at him. Her expression remained unchanged, but she was evidently forming a different judgment of the type of man she had to deal with. Neither his reply nor his manner had been quite what she had expected. She shelved that aspect for a time and turned to me.

“Were you in that too?” she asked.

I explained my somewhat negative part in the affair and put my own question:

“What happened to Michael Beadley, the Colonel, and the rest?”

It was not well received.

“They have gone elsewhere,” she said sharply. “This is a clean, decent community with standards—Christian standards

—and we intend to uphold them. We have no place here for people of loose views. Decadence, immorality, and lack of faith were responsible for mast of the world’s ills. It is the duty of those of us who have been spared to see that we build a society where that does not happen again. The cynical and the clever-clever will find they are not wanted here, no matter what brilliant theories they may put forward to disguise their licentiousness and their materialism. We are a Christian community, and we intend to remain so.” She looked at me challengingly.

“So you split, did you?” I said. “Where did they go?”

She replied stonily;

“They moved on, and we stayed here. That is what matters. So long as they keep their influence away from here, they may work out their own damnation as they please. And since they choose to consider themselves superior to both the laws of God and civilized custom, II have no doubt that they will.”

She ended this declaration with a snap of the jaw which suggested that I should be wasting my time if I tried to pursue the question further, and turned back to Coker.

“What can you do?” she inquired.

“A number of things,” he said calmly. “I suggest that I make myself generally useful until I see where I am needed most.”

She hesitated, a little taken aback. It had clearly been her intention to make the decision and issue the instruction, but she changed her mind.

“All right. Look round, and come and talk it over tomorrow evening,” she said.

But Coker was not to be dismissed quite so easily. He wanted particulars of the size of the estate, the number of persons at present in the house, the proportion of sighted to blind, along with a number of other matters, and he got them.

Before we left 12 put in a question about Josella. Miss Durrant frowned.

“I seem to know that name. Now where— Oh, did she stand in the Conservative interest in the last election?”

“I don’t think so. She—er—she did write a book once,” I admitted.

“She—” she began. Then I saw recollection dawn. “Oh, oh, that Well, really, Mr. Masen, I can scarcely think she would be the kind of person to care far the kind of community we are building here.”

In the corridor outside Coker turned to me. There was just enough of the twilight left for me to see his grin.

“A somewhat oppressive orthodoxy around these parts,” he remarked. The grin disappeared as he added: “Rum type, you know. Pride and prejudice. She’s wanting help. She knows she needs it badly, but nothing’s going to make her admit it.”

He paused opposite an open door. It was almost too dark now to make out anything in the room, but when we had passed it before there had been enough light to reveal it as a men’s dormitory.

“I’m going in to have a word with these chaps. See you later.”

I watched him stroll into the room and greet it collectively with a cheerful “Worcher, mates! ‘Ow’s it goin7” and then made my own way back to the dining hail.

The only light there came from three candles set close together on one table. Beside them a girl peered exasperatedly at same mending.

“Hullo,” she said. “Awful, isn’t it? How on earth did they manage to do anything after dark in the old days?”

“Not such old days, either,” I told her. “This is the future as well as the past—provided there’s somebody to show us how to make candles.”

“I suppose so.” She raised her head and regarded me. “You Came from London today?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“It’s bad there now?”

“It’s finished,” I said.

Of Josella, the girl could tell me nothing. Clearly she had never heard the name before, and my attempts at description roused no recollections.