d torn from
her--"O God, forgive me!"

There were voices in the vestibule, but the girl in the stress of her
prayer did not hear.

"Deal not with us according to our sins, neither reward us according to
our iniquities," she prayed, the accustomed words rushing to her want,
and she was suddenly aware that two people stood in the church. One of
them spoke.

"Don't bother to stay with me," he said, and in the voice, it seemed,
were the qualities that a man's speech should have--strength, certainty,
the unteachable tone of gentle blood, and beyond these the note of
personality, always indescribable, in this case carrying an appeal and
an authority oddly combined. "Don't stay with me. I like to be alone
here. I'm a clergyman, and I enjoy an old church like this. I'd like to
be alone in it," and a bit of silver flashed.

If the tip did it or the compelling voice, the verger murmured a word
about luncheon, was gone, and the girl in her dim corner saw, as the
other turned, that he was the rescuer of her camera, whose name was,
Joe had said and she remembered, Norman North. She was about to move, to
let herself be seen, when the young man knelt suddenly in the
old-fashioned front pew, as a good child might kneel who had been taught
the ways of his mother church, and bent his dark head. She waited
quietly while this servant spoke to his Master. There was no sound in
the silent, sun-lanced church, but outside one heard as from far away
the noises of the village. Katherine's eyes rested on the bowed head,
and she wondered uncertainly if she should let him know of her presence,
or if it might not be better to slip out unnoticed, when in a moment he
had risen and was swinging with a vigorous step up the little corkscrew
stairway of the pulpit. There he stood, facing the silence, facing the
flower-starred shadows, the empty spaces; facing her, but not seeing
her. And the girl forgot herself and the question of her going as she
saw the look in his face, the light which comes at times to those who
give their lives to holiness, since the day when the people, gazing at
Stephen, the martyr, "saw his face as it had been the face of an
angel." When his voice floated out on the dim, sunny atmosphere it
rested as lightly on the silence as if the notes of an organ rolled
through its own place. He spoke a prayer of a service which, to those
whose babyhood has been consecrated by it, whose childhood and youth
have listened to its simple and