The Three Taps by Ronald A. Knox — Read

The dinner-table left a blurred impression on Bredon, for all his habit of observing his fellow men and analysing his feelings about them. The setting-out of the meal had faults that Angela would have condemned, and would have put right in no time; you were conscious at once that the household belonged to bachelors. Yet the meal itself and the cooking of it were of excellent quality; and it was thrown at you with a clamorous, insistent hospitality that made you feel like a guest of honour. The room seemed to be full of priests -- there were five, perhaps, in reality, besides the Bishop -- and every detail of their behaviour proved that they were free from any sense of formality or restraint; yet constant little attentions showed the guest that he was never forgotten. The topic of conversation which Bredon (who in the meantime had informed the Bishop of the post-office mistake) could recall most distinctly afterward was a learned and almost technical discussion between the Bishop and the youngest priest present on the prospects of the local soccer team for next year. Nothing fitted in, somehow, with his scheme of probabilities; there was a Father O'Shaughnessy, who had been born and bred in Pullford and never seemed to have been outside it; there was a Father Edwards who talked with a violent Irish brogue. A teetotaller opposite kept plying him with Barsac.

It was perhaps a delicate attention that Bredon's neighbour, on the side away from the Bishop, was the only other layman present. He was introduced as the Bishop's secretary; and he was the only man in the room who looked like a clergyman. He seemed some fifty years old; he was silent by habit, and spoke with a dry humour that seemed to amuse everybody except himself. Bredon could not help wondering how such a man came to occupy such a position at his time of life, for his voice betrayed university education and he was plainly competent, yet he obviously thought of himself as a supernumerary in the household. The riddle was solved when Bredon, in answer to some question about his journey down to Chilthorpe, explained that he did not come from London itself, but from a village in Surrey, a place called Burrington. "What! " exclaimed Mr. Eames, the secretary, "not Burrington near Hipley? " And, when Bredon asked if he knew Hipley, "Know it? I ought to. I was rector there for ten years."