s she seemed to be taking it very
calmly; a little paler than usual, perhaps; her eyes extraordinarily
dark, but nothing to suggest the illness that had been rumored. Rather
disappointed, they turned their eyes upon her companion; and then the
whispering broke out like the buzzing of a swarm of angry bees.

Mrs. Kildare had brought Mag's baby to be baptized. Philip wondered why
she had come without warning. He did not guess that only an impulse of
sudden courage had brought her there at all. She remembered too keenly
the last time she had come to church with a baby to be baptized.

That was why, perhaps, she so rarely honored with her presence the
church she had built; but she could not explain this reluctance to
Philip. "Church is too small for me," she said to him, airily. "My soul
doesn't breathe between walls very well. I have to do my praying in the
open."

It had long been her custom on Sunday mornings to ride among the
deserted fields with her dogs, taking note of what had been accomplished
during the week past, planning work for the week to come, visiting such
of her tenants or laborers as were sick or incapacitated. Sometimes as
she passed she heard Philip's voice in the pulpit, and stopped for a
while to listen to him. It was no unusual thing for him to see her
there, framed in the sunny square of the open doorway, sitting her
restive horse, surrounded by dogs who leaped and gamboled eagerly, but
in perfect silence, out of respect for the long whip she carried. At
such moments his congregation nudged each other in sympathetic
amusement. Without turning to see, they knew by his flush and his
halting speech who was outside.

But to-day there was no flushing or faltering of speech. Unprepared as
he was, the priest in Philip woke to the necessity, and in his message
the messenger forgot himself. Noting the women's curious, hostile
glances, the buzzing whispers, the stiff-necked anger of the men,
several of whom did not enter the church at all, he laid aside the text
he had prepared and spoke to his people directly and very simply of that
most dramatic episode in history, when Christ said to the crowd in the
streets, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."

While he spoke, he watched the girl sitting beside Mrs. Kildare, and at
the first sign of shrinking, of embarrassment, he would have slipped at
once into another theme. But there was no shrinking in that pretty,
empty face. Indeed, after the firs