nd
himself marvelling at its size, but was recalled to his position when
it became necessary to kneel for the Confession.

The service followed its accustomed course, and throughout the whole of
it Peter was conscious of his chaotic sermon. He glanced at his notes
occasionally, and then put them resolutely away, well aware that they
would be all but useless to him. Either he would, at the last, be able to
formulate the thoughts that raced through his head, or else he could do
no more than occupy the pulpit for the conventional twenty minutes with a
conventional sermon. At times he half thought he would follow this easier
course, but then the great letters of the newspaper poster seemed to
frame themselves before him, and he knew he could not. And so, at last,
there was the bowing beadle with the silver mace, and he must set out on
the little dignified procession to the great Jacobean pulpit with its
velvet cushion at the top.

Hilda's mind was a curious study during that sermon. At first, as her
lover's rather close-cropped, dark-haired head appeared in sight, she had
studied him with an odd mixture of pride and apprehension. She held her
hymn-book, but she did not need it, and she watched surreptitiously while
he opened the Bible, arranged some papers, and, in accordance with
custom, knelt to pray. She began to think half-thoughts of the days that
might be, when perhaps she would be the wife of the Rector of some St.
John's, and later, possibly, of a Bishop. Peter had it in him to go far,
she knew. She half glanced round with a self-conscious feeling that
people might be guessing at her thoughts, and then back, wondering
suddenly if she really knew the man, or only the minister. And then there
came the rustle of shutting books and of people composing themselves to
listen, the few coughs, the vague suggestion of hassocks and cushions
being made comfortable. And then, in a moment, almost with the giving out
of the text, the sudden stillness and that tense sensation which told
that the young orator had gripped his congregation.

Thereafter she hardly heard him, as it were, and she certainly lost the
feeling of ownership that had been hers before. As he leaned over the
pulpit, and the words rang out almost harshly from their intensity, she
began to see, as the rest of the congregation began to see, the images
that the preacher conjured up before her. A sense of coming disaster
riveted her--the feeling that she was alread