Why
should they be?"
She looked for a moment at Aunt Anne and saw her in an ecstasy,
singing in her cracked tuneless voice, a smile about her lips and in
her eyes, that gazed far, far beyond that Chapel. Maggie felt the
approach of tears; she stopped singing--softly the refrain of the
last verse came:
By the blood, by the blood, by the blood of the Lamb We beseech
Thee!
The hymn over, Mr. Warlock read the Bible and then offered up a long
extempore prayer. Strangely enough Mr. Warlock brought Maggie back
to reality--strangely because, on an earlier occasion, he had done
exactly the opposite. She realised at once that he was not happy to-
night. Before, he had been himself caught up into the mood that held
the Chapel; to-night he was fighting against a mood that was then
outside him, a mood with which he did not sympathise and in which he
could not believe.
She saw that he was unhappy, he spoke slowly, without the
spontaneity and force that he had used before; once he made a long
pause and you could feel throughout the Chapel a wave of nervous
apprehension, as though every one were waiting to see whether he
would fight his way through or not.
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