to see
again hung as a picture in the rooms of her mind for the rest of her
life--the youth, the desperate anxiety as of one who throws her last
piece upon the gaming-table, the poverty of the shabby black dress, the
real physical austerity and asceticism of the white cheeks and the thin
arms and pale hands--this figure remained a symbol for Maggie. She used
to wonder in after years, when fortune had carried her far enough away
from all this world, what had happened to that girl. But she was never
to know.

There were faces, too, like Miss Pyncheon's, calm, contented,
confident, old women who had found in their religion the panacea of all
their troubles. There were faces like Mrs. Smith's, coarse and vulgar,
out for any sensation that might come along, and ready instantly to
express their contempt if the particular "trick" that they were
expecting failed to come off; other faces, again, like Amy Warlock's,
grimly set upon secret thoughts and purposes of their own, faces
trained to withstand any sudden attack on the emotions, but eager, too,
like the rest for some revelation that was to answer all questions and
satisfy all expectations.

Maggie wondered, as she looked about her, how she could have raised in
her own imagination, around the Chapel and its affairs, so formidable
an atmosphere of terror and tyrannic discipline. Here gathered together
were a few women, tired, pale, many of them uneducated, awaiting like
children the opening of a box, the springing into flower of a dry husk
of a seed, the raising of the curtain on some wonderful scene. Maggie,
as she looked at them, knew that they must be disappointed, and her
heart ached for them all, yes, even for Amy Warlock, her declared
enemy. She lost, as she sat there, for the moment all sense of her own
personal history. She only saw them all tired and hungry and expectant;
perhaps, after all, there WAS something behind it all--something for
which they had a right to be searching; even of that she had not sure
knowledge--but the pathos and also the bravery of their search touched
and moved her. She was beginning to understand something of the beauty
that hovered like a bird always just out of sight about the ugly walls
of the Chapel.

"Whatever they want, poor dears," she thought, "I do hope they get it."

Miss Avies opened the meeting with an extempore prayer: then they all
stood up and sang a hymn, and their quavering voices were thin and
sharp and strained in