enly revealed to her what
Helen meant and St. John meant when they proclaimed their hatred of
Christianity. With the violence that now marked her feelings, she
rejected all that she had implicitly believed.

Meanwhile Mr. Bax was half-way through the second lesson. She looked at
him. He was a man of the world with supple lips and an agreeable manner,
he was indeed a man of much kindliness and simplicity, though by no
means clever, but she was not in the mood to give any one credit for
such qualities, and examined him as though he were an epitome of all the
vices of his service.

Right at the back of the chapel Mrs. Flushing, Hirst, and Hewet sat in
a row in a very different frame of mind. Hewet was staring at the roof
with his legs stuck out in front of him, for as he had never tried to
make the service fit any feeling or idea of his, he was able to enjoy
the beauty of the language without hindrance. His mind was occupied
first with accidental things, such as the women's hair in front of
him, the light on the faces, then with the words which seemed to him
magnificent, and then more vaguely with the characters of the other
worshippers. But when he suddenly perceived Rachel, all these thoughts
were driven out of his head, and he thought only of her. The psalms,
the prayers, the Litany, and the sermon were all reduced to one chanting
sound which paused, and then renewed itself, a little higher or a little
lower. He stared alternately at Rachel and at the ceiling, but his
expression was now produced not by what he saw but by something in his
mind. He was almost as painfully disturbed by his thoughts as she was by
hers.

Early in the service Mrs. Flushing had discovered that she had taken up
a Bible instead of a prayer-book, and, as she was sitting next to Hirst,
she stole a glance over his shoulder. He was reading steadily in the
thin pale-blue volume. Unable to understand, she peered closer, upon
which Hirst politely laid the book before her, pointing to the first
line of a Greek poem and then to the translation opposite.

"What's that?" she whispered inquisitively.

"Sappho," he replied. "The one Swinburne did--the best thing that's ever
been written."

Mrs. Flushing could not resist such an opportunity. She gulped down the
Ode to Aphrodite during the Litany, keeping herself with difficulty from
asking when Sappho lived, and what else she wrote worth reading, and
contriving to come in punctually at the end with "th