Suddenly, as he watched in a blank sort of way Brother Soulsby take
out a penknife, and lop an offending twig from a rose-bush against the
fence, something occurred to him. There was a curious exception to
that rule of Alice's isolation. She had made at least one friend. Levi
Gorringe seemed to like her extremely.

As if his mind had been a camera, Theron snapped a shutter down upon
this odd, unbidden idea, and turned away from the window.

The sounds of an active, almost strenuous conversation in female voices
came from the kitchen. Theron opened the door noiselessly, and put in
his head, conscious of something furtive in his intention.

"You must dreen every drop of water off the spinach, mind, before you
put it over, or else--"

It was Sister Soulsby's sharp and penetrating tones which came to him.
Theron closed the door again, and surrendered himself once more to the
circling whirl of his thoughts.

CHAPTER XV

A love-feast at nine in the morning opened the public services of a
Sunday still memorable in the annals of Octavius Methodism.

This ceremony, which four times a year preceded the sessions of the
Quarterly Conference, was not necessarily an event of importance. It
was an occasion upon which the brethren and sisters who clung to the
old-fashioned, primitive ways of the itinerant circuit-riders, let
themselves go with emphasized independence, putting up more vehement
prayers than usual, and adding a special fervor of noise to their
"Amens!" and other interjections--and that was all.

It was Theron's first love-feast in Octavius, and as the big class-room
in the church basement began to fill up, and he noted how the men with
ultra radical views and the women clad in the most ostentatious drabs
and grays were crowding into the front seats, he felt his spirits
sinking. He had literally to force himself from sentence to sentence,
when the time came for him to rise and open the proceedings with an
exhortation. He had eagerly offered this function to the Presiding
Elder, the Rev. Aziel P. Larrabee, who sat in severe silence on the
little platform behind him, but had been informed that the dignitary
would lead off in giving testimony later on. So Theron, feeling all the
while the hostile eyes of the Elder burning holes in his back, dragged
himself somehow through the task. He had never known any such difficulty
of speech before. The relief was almost overwhelming when he came to
the customary part