on of pushing
aside from her eyes something heavy that clung and blinded. What part of
her spirit that was not wholly darkened and folded within itself was back
in the mountains of her childhood, with those of her own blood whom she
had loved and lost. What use to try to understand to-day,--to-day with its
falling skies, its bewildered pondering over the words that were said to
her last night? And the morrow,--she must leave that. Perhaps when it
should dawn he would come to her, and call her "little maid," and laugh at
her dreadful dream. But now, while it was to-day, she could not think of
him without an agony of pain and bewilderment. He was ill, too, and
suffering. Oh, she must leave the thought of him alone! Back then to the
long yesterdays she traveled, and played quietly, dreamily, with Robin on
the green grass beside the shining stream, or sat on the doorstep, her
head on Molly's lap, and watched the evening star behind the Endless
Mountains.

It was very quiet in the church save for that one great voice speaking.
Little by little the voice impressed itself upon her consciousness. The
eyes of her mind were upon long ranges of mountains distinct against the
splendor of a sunset sky. Last seen in childhood, viewed now through the
illusion of the years, the mountains were vastly higher than nature had
planned them; the streamers of light shot to the zenith; the black forests
were still; everywhere a fixed glory, a gigantic silence, a holding of the
breath for things to happen.

By degrees the voice in her ears fitted in with the landscape, became, so
solemn and ringing it was, like the voice of the archangel of that sunset
land. Audrey listened at last; and suddenly the mountains were gone, and
the light from the sky, and her people were dead and dust away in that
hidden valley, and she was sitting in the church at Williamsburgh, alone,
without a friend.

What was the preacher saying? What ball of the night before was he
describing with bitter power, the while he gave warning of handwriting
upon the wall such as had menaced Belshazzar's feast of old? Of what
shameless girl was he telling,--what creature dressed in silks that should
have gone in rags, brought to that ball by her paramour--

The gaunt figure in the pulpit trembled like a leaf with the passion of
the preacher's convictions and the energy of his utterance. On had gone
the stream of rhetoric, the denunciations, the satire, the tremendous
assertions