them, rose with extended arms, and the
services had begun. The chorus stood again, and the church choir faced
them from the gallery and sang with them antiphonally, to the spiritual
discomfort of many who counted it the latest agony of modernness. In the
long prayer the diversity of sects and fashions showed forth; but a
majority tried hard not to resent any posture different from their own,
although Miss Martha Salter and many others who buried their faces in
their own seats, knew that Mr. Ravenel's eyes were counting the cracks
in the plastering.

Barbara knelt forward--the Montrose mode. She heard Parson Tombs confess
the Job-like loathsomeness of everyone present; but his long-familiar,
chanting monotones fainted and died in the portals of her ears like a
nurse's song, while her sinking eyelids shut not out, but in, one
tallish Rosemont senior who had risen in prayer visibly heavy with the
sleep he had robbed from three successive nights. The chirp of a lone
cricket somewhere under the floor led her forth in a half dream beyond
the town and the gleaming turnpike, across wide fields whose
multitudinous, tiny life rasped and buzzed under the vibrant heat; and
so on to Rosemont, dear Rosemont, and the rose mother there.

Her fan stops. An unearthly sweetness, an unconditioned bliss, a
heavenly disembodiment too perfect for ecstasy, an oblivion surcharged
with light, a blessed rarefaction of self that fills the house, the air,
the sky, and ascends full of sweet odors and soothing sounds, wafts her
up on the cadenced lullaby of the long, long prayer. Is it finished? No.

"Oh, quicken our drowsy powers!" she hears the pastor cry on a rising
wave of monotone, and starts the fan again. Is she in church or in
Rosemont? She sees Johanna beckoning in her old, cajoling way, asking,
as in fact, not fancy, she had done the evening before, for the latest
news of Cornelius, and hearing with pious thankfulness that Leggett has
reappeared in his official seat, made a speech that filled the house
with laughter and applause, put parties into a better humor with each
other than they had been for years, and remains, and, for the present,
will remain, unmolested.

Still Parson Tombs is praying. The fan waggles briskly, then more
slowly--slowly--slowly, and sinks to rest on her white-robed bosom. The
head, heavy with luminous brown hair, careens gently upon one cheek;
that ineffably sweet dissolution into all nature and space comes agai