already than
any other feeling was the wish to bury her secret--Rowan's
secret--in the deepest vault of consciousness, to seal it up
forever from the knowledge of the world.

The next moment what she so dreaded took place. He walked quietly
down the aisle as usual, opened the pew for his mother and brother
with the same courtesy, and the three bent their heads together in
prayer.

"Grandmother," she whispered quickly, "will you let me pass! I am
not very well, I think I shall go home."

Her grandmother, not heeding and with her eyes fixed upon the same
pew, whispered in return;

"The Merediths are here," and continued her satisfying scrutiny of
persons seated around.

Isabel herself had no sooner suffered the words to escape than she
regretted them. Resolved to control herself from this time on, she
unclasped her prayer-book, found the appointed reading, and
directed her thoughts to the service soon to begin.

It was part of the confession of David that reached her, sounding
across how many centuries. Wrung from him who had been a young man
himself and knew what a young man is. With time enough afterwards
to think of this as soldier, priest, prophet, care-worn king, and
fallible judge over men--with time enough to think of what his days
of nature had been when he tended sheep grazing the pastures of
Bethlehem or abided solitary with the flock by night, lowly
despised work, under the herded stars. Thus converting a young
man's memories into an older man's remorses.

As she began to read, the first outcry gripped and cramped her
heart like physical pain; where all her life she had been repeating
mere words, she now with eyes tragically opened discerned forbidden
meanings:

"_Thou art about my path and about my bed . . . the darkness is no
darkness to thee. . . . Thine eyes did see my substance being yet
imperfect . . . look well if there be any wickedness in me; and
lead me in the way everlasting . . . haste thee unto me . . .
when I cry unto thee. O let not my heart be inclined to an evil
thing_."

She was startled by a general movement throughout the congregation.
The minister had advanced to the reading desk and begun to read:

"_I will arise and go to my father and will say unto him: Father, I
have sinned against heaven and before thee and am no more worthy to
be called thy son_."

Ages stretched their human wastes between these words of the New
Testament and those other words of the Old;