nterruptions--but caught up her own tambourine, singing,
and instantly the chorus was general, the Big drum thumping out the
measure, all the tambourines shaking together.

"You who now contemn your God,
How will you do? How will you do?"

The Duke's Own sang lustily with a dogged enjoyment that made little of
the words. Some of them assumed a vacuity to counteract the sentiment,
but most of the sheepish countenances expressed that the tune was the
thing, one or two with a smile of jovial cynicism, and kept time with
their feet. Through the medley of voices--everybody sang except Arnold
and Lindsay and the Chinaman--Laura's seemed to flow, separate and
clear, threading the jangle upon melody, and turning the doggerel into
an appeal, direct, intense. When Lindsay presently saw it addressed to
him, in the unmistakable intention of her eyes, he caught his breath.

"Death will be a solemn day
When the soul is forced away,
It will be too late to pray;
How will you do?"

It was simple enough. All her supreme desire to convince, to turn, to
make awfully plain, had centred upon the single person in the room with
whom she had the advantage of acquaintance, whose face her own could
seek with a kind of right to response. But the sensation Duff Lindsay
tried to sit still under was not simple. It had the novelty, the shock,
of a plunge into the sea; behind his decorous countenance he gasped
and blinked, with unfamiliar sounds in his ears. His soul seemed
shudderingly repelling Laura's, yet the buffets themselves were
enthralling. In the strangeness of it he made a mechanical movement to
depart, picked up his stick, but Arnold was sitting holding his chin,
wrapped in quiet interest, and took no notice. The hymn stopped, and
he found a few minutes' respite, during which Ensign Sand addressed the
meeting, unveiling each heart to its possessor; while Laura turned over
the leaves of the hymn-book, looking, Lindsay was profoundly aware,
for airs and verses most likely to help the siege of the Army to his
untaken, sinful citadel. There was time to bring him calmness enough to
wonder whether these were the symptoms of emotional conversion, the sort
of thing these people went in for, and he resolved to watch his state
with interest. Then, before he knew it, they were all down on their
knees again, and Laura was praying; and he was not aware of the meaning
of a single word that she said, only th