All sang it lustily, and when it was ended all dropped on their knees.  The Minister broke into prayer—­at first in smooth, running sentences, formal thanksgivings for the feast just concluded, for the plenty of seedtime and harvest, for the kindly fruits of the earth, with invocations of blessing upon the house and the family.  But by and by, as these petitions grew more intimate, his breath came in short gasps.  “O the Blood!” he began to cry; “the precious Blood of Redemption!” And at intervals one or other of his listeners answered “Amen!” “Hallelujah!” Tilda wondered what on earth it was all about; wondered too—­for she knelt with her back to the great fireplace—­if the shepherd had laid by his pipe and was kneeling among the ashes.  Something in the Minister’s voice had set her brain in a whirl, and kept it whirling.

“Glory!  Glory!  The Blood!  Glory be for the Blood!”

And with that, of a sudden the man was shouting a prayer for her—­for her and Arthur Miles, “that these two lambs also might be led home with the flock, and sealed—­sealed with the Blood, with the precious Blood, with the ever-flowing Blood of Redemption—­”

Her brain seemed to be spinning in a sea of blood . . .  Men and women, all had risen from their knees now, and stood blinking each in the other’s faces half-stupidly.  The Minister’s powerful voice had ceased, but he had set them going as a man might twirl a teetotum; and in five or six seconds one of the men—­it was Roger, the young giant—­burst forth with a cry, and began to ejaculate what he called his “experience.”  He had been tempted to commit the Sin without Pardon; had been pursued by it for weeks, months, when alone in the fields; had been driven to wrestle with it in hollows and waste places, Satan always at his ear whispering to him to say the words of blasphemy, to cross the line, to have rest of mind though it were in damnation.  To Tilda this was all mere gibberish, but to the youth and to his hearers all real and deadly earnest.  His words came painfully, from a dry throat; the effort twisted him in bodily contortions pitiful to see; the sweat stood on his handsome young forehead—­the brow of a tortured Apollo.  And the circle of listeners bent forward to the tale, eager, absorbed, helping out his agony with groans and horrified murmurs.  They held their breath, and when he reached the crisis, and in a gush of words related his deliverance—­casting up both arms and drawing one long shuddering breath—­they could almost see the bonds burst on the muscles of his magnificent chest, and broke afresh into exultant cries:  “Glory!” “Hallelujah!” “The Blood—­the Blood!” while the shepherd in the ingle-nook slowly knocked out the ashes of his pipe against the heel of his boot.  He was a free-thinker, an ex-Chartist, and held himself aloof from these emotions, though privileged, as an old retainer, to watch them.  His face was impassive as a carved idol’s.