conventional,
phrases. His wife, following him, delivered in a melodious monotone some
equally hackneyed remarks. The assemblage, listening in rapt attention,
felt the suggestion of reserved power in every sentence she uttered, and
burst forth, as she dropped into her seat, in a loud chorus of approving
ejaculations. The Soulsbys had captured Octavius with their first outer
skirmish line.

Everything seemed to move forward now with a new zest and spontaneity.
Theron had picked out for the occasion the best of those sermons which
he had prepared in Tyre, at the time when he was justifying his ambition
to be accounted a pulpit orator. It was orthodox enough, but had been
planned as the framework for picturesque and emotional rhetoric rather
than doctrinal edification. He had never dreamed of trying it on
Octavius before, and only on the yesterday had quavered at his own
daring in choosing it now. Nothing but the desire to show Sister Soulsby
what was in him had held him to the selection.

Something of this same desire no doubt swayed and steadied him now in
the pulpit. The labored slowness of his beginning seemed to him to be
due to nervous timidity, until suddenly, looking down into those big
eyes of Sister Soulsby's, which were bent gravely upon him from where
she sat beside Alice in the minister's pew, he remembered that it was
instead the studied deliberation which art had taught him. He went on,
feeling more and more that the skill and histrionic power of his best
days were returning to him, were as marked as ever--nay, had never
triumphed before as they were triumphing now. The congregation watched
and listened with open, steadfast eyes and parted lips. For the first
time in all that weary quarter, their faces shone. The sustaining
sparkle of their gaze lifted him to a peroration unrivalled in his own
recollection of himself.

He sat down, and bent his head forward upon the open Bible, breathing
hard, but suffused with a glow of satisfaction. His ears caught the
music of that sighing rustle through the audience which bespeaks a
profound impression. He could scarcely keep the fingers of his hands,
covering his bowed face in a devotional posture as they were, from
drumming a jubilant tattoo. His pulses did this in every vein, throbbing
with excited exultation. The insistent whim seized him, as he still
bent thus before his people, to whisper to his own heart, "At last!--The
dogs!"

The announcement that in the ev