s and in her eyes,
that gazed far, far beyond that Chapel. Maggie felt the approach of
tears; she stopped singing--softly the refrain of the last verse came:

By the blood, by the blood, by the blood of the Lamb We beseech Thee!

The hymn over, Mr. Warlock read the Bible and then offered up a long
extempore prayer. Strangely enough Mr. Warlock brought Maggie back to
reality--strangely because, on an earlier occasion, he had done exactly
the opposite. She realised at once that he was not happy to-night.
Before, he had been himself caught up into the mood that held the
Chapel; to-night he was fighting against a mood that was then outside
him, a mood with which he did not sympathise and in which he could not
believe.

She saw that he was unhappy, he spoke slowly, without the spontaneity
and force that he had used before; once he made a long pause and you
could feel throughout the Chapel a wave of nervous apprehension, as
though every one were waiting to see whether he would fight his way
through or not. Maggie felt her earlier emotion sentimental and false,
it was as though he had said to her: "But that's not the true thing;
that's cheap sham emotion. That's what they're trying to turn our great
reality into. I'm fighting them and you must help me."

He was fighting them. She could imagine Mr. Thurston's scornful lip,
hidden now by his hands. As Mr. Warlock went on with his dignified
sentences, his restraint and his reverence, she could fancy how
Thurston was saying to himself: "But what's the good of this? It's
blood and thunder we want. The old feller's getting past his work. He
must go."

But it was Mr. Warlock's reality of which she was afraid. As he
continued his prayer she felt all her old terror return, that terror
that she had known on the night her father died, during the hours that
she had watched beside his dead body, at the moment when she had first
arrived at the house in London, during her first visit to the Chapel,
when she had said good-night to her aunt before going out with Uncle
Mathew ... And now Mr. Warlock was sweeping her still farther inside.
The intensity of his belief forced hers. There was something real in
this power of God, and you could not finish with it simply by
disregarding it. She felt, as she had felt so often lately, that some
one was suddenly going to rise and demand some oath or promise from her
that she, in her panic, would give her word and then would be caught
for ever.

"B