took up the strain,
mournfully but clearly, with a hush in it as if one sang on Calvary.

"Yet we hid, as it were, our faces from Him. He was despised, and we
esteemed him not."

Well; He only knows what it spoke to the woman, who listened with her
guilty face hidden in her hair; how it drew her like a call to join the
throng that worshipped him.

"I'd like to hear the rest," she muttered to herself. "I wonder what it
is about."

A child came down from the gallery just then, a ragged boy, who, like
herself, had wandered in from the street.

"Hilloa, Meg!" he said, laughing, "_you_ going to meeting? That's a good
joke!" If she had heard him, she would have turned away. But her hand
was on the latch; the door had swung upon its noiseless hinges; the
pealing organ drowned his voice. She went in and sat down in an empty
slip close by the door, looking about her for the moment in a sort of
childish wonder. The church was a blaze of light and color. One
perceived a mist of gayly dressed people, a soft flutter of fans, and
faint, sweet perfumes below; the velvet-cushioned pulpit, and pale,
scholarly outlines of the preacher's face above; the warmth of
rainbow-tinted glass; the wreathed and massive carving of oaken cornice;
the glitter of gas-light from a thousand prisms, and the silence of the
dome beyond.

The brightness struck sharply against the woman sitting there alone. Her
face seemed to grow grayer and harder in it. The very hush of that
princely sanctuary seemed broken by her polluted presence. True, she
kept afar off; she did not so much as lift up her eyes to heaven; she
had but stolen in to hear the chanted words that were meant for the
acceptance and the comfort of the pure, bright worshippers,--sinners, to
be sure, in their way; but then, Christ died for _them_. This
tabernacle, to which they had brought their purple and gold and scarlet,
for his praise, was not meant for such as Meg, you know.

But she had come into it, nevertheless. If He had called her there, she
did not know it. She only sat and listened to the chanting, forgetting
what she was; forgetting to wonder if there were one of all that
reverent throng who would be willing to sit and worship beside her.

The singing ended at last, and the pale preacher began his sermon. But
Meg did not care for that; she could not understand it. She crouched
down in the corner of the pew, her hood drawn far over her face,
repeating to herself now and then,