reason I've held him off for years?"

"Just because you could, Fannie."

"No, my dear little goosie, I did it because he never was so he couldn't
be held off. I knew, and know yet, that after the wedding I've got to do
all the courting. I don't doubt he loves me, but Barb, love isn't his
master. That's what keeps me scared." They went in.

The service began. In this hour for the putting away of vanities the
choir was dispensed with and the singing was led by a locally noted
precentor, a large, pert, lazy Yankee, who had failed in the raising of
small fruits. His zeal was beautiful.

"Trouble! 'Tain't never no trouble for me to do nawthin', an' even if
'twas I'd do it!" He sang each word in an argumentative staccato, and in
high passages you could see his wisdom teeth. Between stanzas he spoke
stimulating exhortations: "Louder, brethren and sisters, louder; the
fate of immortal souls may be a-hangin' on the amount of noise you
make."

As hymn followed hymn the church filled. All sorts--black or yellow
being no sort--all sorts came; the town's best and worst, the country's
proudest and forlornest; the sipper of wine, the dipper of snuff; acrid
pietist, flagrant reprobate, and many a true Christian whose
God-forgiven sins, if known to men, neither church nor world could have
pardoned; many a soul that under the disguise of flippant smiles or
superior frowns staggered in its darkness or shivered in its cold,
trembling under visions of death and judgment or yearning for one right
word of guidance or extrication; and many a heart that openly or
secretly bled for some other heart's reclaim. And so the numbers grew
and the waves of song swelled. The adagios and largos of ancient
psalmody were engulfed and the modern "hyme toons," as the mountain
people called them, were so "peert an' devilish" that the most heedless
grew attentive, and lovers of raw peanuts, and even devotees of tobacco,
emptied their mouths of these and filled them with praise.

Garnet had never preached more effectively. For the first time in
Barbara's experience he seemed to her to feel, himself, genuinely and
deeply the things he said. His text was, "Be sure your sin will find you
out." Men marvelled at the life-likeness with which he pictured the
torments of a soul torn by hidden and cherished sin. So wonderful, they
murmured, are the pure intuitions of oratorical genius! Yet Barbara was
longing for a widely different word.

Not for herself. It wa