t she summoned all her pride to
her aid. Pride said:

"You will have to go to church to hear her. You haven't fit clothes to
go to church in. Think what a figure you will make before them all."

But, for the first time, a more insistent voice than pride spoke to her
soul--and, for the first time, the Old Lady listened to it. It was too
true that she had never gone to church since the day on which she had
to begin wearing her mother's silk dresses. The Old Lady herself thought
that this was very wicked; and she tried to atone by keeping Sunday very
strictly, and always having a little service of her own, morning and
evening. She sang three hymns in her cracked voice, prayed aloud, and
read a sermon. But she could not bring herself to go to church in her
out-of-date clothes--she, who had once set the fashions in Spencervale,
and the longer she stayed away, the more impossible it seemed that she
should ever again go. Now the impossible had become, not only possible,
but insistent. She must go to church and hear Sylvia sing, no matter how
ridiculous she appeared, no matter how people talked and laughed at her.

Spencervale congregation had a mild sensation the next afternoon. Just
before the opening of service Old Lady Lloyd walked up the aisle and sat
down in the long-unoccupied Lloyd pew, in front of the pulpit.

The Old Lady's very soul was writhing within her. She recalled the
reflection she had seen in her mirror before she left--the old black
silk in the mode of thirty years agone and the queer little bonnet of
shirred black satin. She thought how absurd she must look in the eyes of
her world.

As a matter of fact, she did not look in the least absurd. Some women
might have; but the Old Lady's stately distinction of carriage and
figure was so subtly commanding that it did away with the consideration
of garmenting altogether.

The Old Lady did not know this. But she did know that Mrs. Kimball,
the storekeeper's wife, presently rustled into the next pew in the very
latest fashion of fabric and mode; she and Mrs. Kimball were the same
age, and there had been a time when the latter had been content
to imitate Margaret Lloyd's costumes at a humble distance. But the
storekeeper had proposed, and things were changed now; and there sat
poor Old Lady Lloyd, feeling the change bitterly, and half wishing she
had not come to church at all.

Then all at once the Angel of Love touched there foolish thoughts, born
of vanity