sy was
reluctant to re-open it because, in some intangible way, it seemed bound
up with the rather awkward subject of Arthur.

After supper father conversed with her about a piece she was reading
in the Sunday Supplement, and seemed anxious to make her feel happy and
contented. So softened was he that, when Tess telephoned and invited
Missy to accompany the O'Neill family to the Methodist church that
evening, he lent permission to the unusual excursion.

The unusualness of it--the Merriams performed their Sabbath devotions
at 11 A.M.--served to give Missy a greater thrill than usually attends
going to church. Besides, since the Merriams were Presbyterians,
going to the Methodist church held a certain novelty--savouring of
entertainment--and diversion from the same old congregation, the same
old church choir, and the same old preacher. In literal truth, also,
the new Methodist preacher was not old; he was quite young. Missy had
already heard reports of him. Some of the Methodist girls declared
that though ugly he was perfectly fascinating; and grandpa and grandma
Merriam, who were Methodists (as had been her own father before he
married mother, a Presbyterian), granted that he was human as well as
inspired.

As Missy entered the Methodist church that evening with the O'Neills, it
didn't occur to her memory that it was in this very edifice she had once
felt the flame divine. It was once when her mother was away visiting and
her less rigidly strict grandparents had let her stay up evenings
and attend revival meetings with them. But all that had happened long
ago--five years ago, when she was a little thing of ten. One forgets
much in five years. So she felt no stir of memory and no presentiment of
a coincidence to come.

Reverend MacGill, the new minister, at first disappointed her. He was
tall and gaunt; and his face was long and gaunt, lighted with deep-set,
smouldering, dark eyes and topped with an unruly thatch of dark hair.
Missy thought him terribly ugly until he smiled, and then she wasn't
quite so sure. As the sermon went on and his harsh but flexible voice
mounted, now and then, to an impassioned height, she would feel herself
mounting with it; then when it fell again to calmness, she would feel
herself falling, too. She understood why grandma called him "inspired."
And once when his smile, on one of its sudden flashes from out that dark
gauntness of his face, seemed aimed directly at her she felt a quick,
re