irl amid Iowa cornfields. She took the bit of
flattened lead and pressed it between her burning palms.

"I hope you won't get hardened in unbelief, Lloyd," she said soberly.

The congregation was drifting toward the church again, and the young
people turned. Lloyd touched the iridescent silk of her wide sleeve.

"You ain't a-going to let this make any difference between you and me,
are you, Marg'et Ann?" he pleaded.

"I don't know," wavered the girl. "I hope you'll be brought to a sense
of your true condition, Lloyd." She hesitated, smoothing the sheen of
her skirt. "It would be an awful cross to father and mother."

The young man fell behind her in the narrow path, and they walked to the
church door in unhappy silence.

Inside, the elders had accomplished the spreading of the tables with
slow-moving, awkward reverence. The spotless drapery swayed a little in
the afternoon breeze, and there was a faint fruity smell of communion
wine in the room.

The two ministers and some of the older communicants sat with bowed
heads, in deep spiritual isolation.

The solemn stillness of self-examination pervaded the room, and Marg'et
Ann went to her seat with a vague stirring of resentment in her heart
toward the Rev. Samuel McClanahan, who, with all his learning, could not
convince this one lost sheep of the error of his theological way. She
put aside such thoughts, however, before the serving of the tables, and
walked humbly down the aisle behind her mother, singing the one hundred
and sixteenth psalm to the quaint rising and falling cadences of
"Dundee."

Once, while the visiting pastor addressed the communicants, she thought
how it would simplify matters if Lloyd were sitting opposite her, and
then caught her breath as the minister adjured each one to examine
himself, lest eating and drinking unworthily he should eat and drink
damnation to himself.

It was almost sunset when the service ended, and as the Morrisons drove
into the lane the smell of jimson-weed was heavy on the evening air, and
they could hear the clank of the cow bells in the distance.

Marg'et Ann went to her room to lay aside her best dress and get ready
for the milking, and Mrs. Morrison and Rebecca made haste to see about
supper.

Miss Nancy McClanahan walked about the garden in her much made-over
black silk, and compared the progress of Mrs. Morrison's touch-me-nots
and four-o'clocks with her own, nipping herself a sprig of tansy from
the patch