n his own
church, their countenances underwent a lightning change of almost happy
relief. Never can I forget the naive sweetness with which those people
turned up their untroubled eyes to William and received his thundering
exhortations. They seemed proud of his courage--for, indeed, he nearly
broke his heart condemning them--and at the same time they seemed to be
bearing with him as they would bear with the vagaries of a good and
loving old father.

Sister C and Sister Z sat near the front, surrounded by their
respective cherubim broods, looking up at him with tender humorous
eyes. The children, indeed, felt something alien to peace in the
atmosphere. They regarded him fearfully, then turned meek, inquisitive
faces to their mothers; but those two extraordinary women never blinked
or blushed from start to finish, although they were deeply dyed with
all the guilt William mentioned. The one person present who received
the discourse with almost vindictive signs of indorsement was Brother
Billy Smithers, a man who had lived an exasperatingly regular life in
the church for more than forty years. He sent up Amens fervid with the
heat of his furious spirit at the end of each charge and condemnation.

CHAPTER IX

WILLIAM AND THE FEMININE SOUL

I do not know if I make you understand that all this time the years
were passing--five, ten, fifteen, twenty--and in them we went together
up and down and around our little world, William offering his Lord's
salvation without any wisdom of words worth mentioning, yet with a
wisdom as sweet, as redolent of goodness as the carnations in Heaven
are of Paradise. And I followed after him, holding up his hands, often
with my own eyes blindfolded to the spiritual necessities of the
situation, praying when he prayed, though many a time I could have
trusted our Father to do the square thing without so much knee-anguish
of the soul; and this is how at the end of so many years in the
itinerancy I began to take on the look of it--that is to say, I had
faded; and although I still wore little decorative fragments of my
wedding finery, my clothes in general had the peculiar prayer-meeting
set that is observable in the garments of every Methodist preacher's
wife at this stage of her fidelity to the cause. There is something
solemn and uncompromising in her waist-line, something mournfully
beseeching in the down-drooping folds of her skirt, and I do not know
anything in Nature more path