ay. The "choir" was the piano in the living-room drawn up close to the
window, with Genevieve herself seated at it. Nor was the "church" itself
devoid of beauty, with its growing vines and flowers, and its shifting
lights and shadows as the soft clouds sailed slowly through the blue sky
overhead. As to the audience--no scholarly orator in a Fifth Avenue
cathedral found that day more attentive listeners than did that
tired-looking minister find in the curiously-assorted groups before
him--the swarthy Mexicans, the picturesque cowboys, the eager-eyed,
fresh-faced young girls from a far-away town in the East.

They sang first, Genevieve's own clear voice leading; and even Tilly,
who seldom sang in church at home, found herself joining heartily in
"Nearer my God to Thee," and "Bringing in the Sheaves." There was
something so free, so whole-souled about the music in that soft outdoor
air, that she, as well as some of the others, decided that never before
had any music sounded so inspiring.

For the first two minutes after the preacher arose to begin his sermon,
Mrs. Kennedy saw nothing but the dust on the right shoulder of his coat.
But after that she saw nothing but his earnest eyes. She had fallen
then quite under the sway of his clear, ringing voice.

"'While Josiah was yet young, in the sixteenth year of his age, he began
to seek the God of his fathers,'" announced the clear, ringing voice as
the text; and Genevieve, hearing it, wondered if the minister could have
known that at least a part of his audience that day would be so exactly,
or so very nearly, "in the sixteenth year" of their own age.

It was a good sermon, and it was well preached. The time, the place, the
occasion, the atmosphere all helped, too. All the Happy Hexagons paid
reverent attention. Tilly, fresh from her somewhat amazing experience
with Cordelia, made many and stern resolutions to be everything that was
good and helpful, nothing that was bad and hateful. Genevieve, who had
slipped off her piano stool to an easier chair, sat with dreamy, tender
eyes. She was thinking of the dear mother, who, as she could so well
remember, had told her that she must always be good and brave and true
first, before anything else.

"Good and brave and true!" She wondered if she could--always. It seemed
so easy to do it now, with this good man's earnest voice in her ears.
But it was so hard, so strangely hard, at other times. And there were so
many things--so many,