The next moment what she so dreaded took place.  He walked quietly down the aisle as usual, opened the pew for his mother and brother with the same courtesy, and the three bent their heads together in prayer.

“Grandmother,” she whispered quickly, “will you let me pass!  I am not very well, I think I shall go home.”

Her grandmother, not heeding and with her eyes fixed upon the same pew, whispered in return;

“The Merediths are here,” and continued her satisfying scrutiny of persons seated around.

Isabel herself had no sooner suffered the words to escape than she regretted them.  Resolved to control herself from this time on, she unclasped her prayer-book, found the appointed reading, and directed her thoughts to the service soon to begin.

It was part of the confession of David that reached her, sounding across how many centuries.  Wrung from him who had been a young man himself and knew what a young man is.  With time enough afterwards to think of this as soldier, priest, prophet, care-worn king, and fallible judge over men—­with time enough to think of what his days of nature had been when he tended sheep grazing the pastures of Bethlehem or abided solitary with the flock by night, lowly despised work, under the herded stars.  Thus converting a young man’s memories into an older man’s remorses.

As she began to read, the first outcry gripped and cramped her heart like physical pain; where all her life she had been repeating mere words, she now with eyes tragically opened discerned forbidden meanings: 

“Thou art about my path and about my bed . . . the darkness is no darkness to thee. . . .  Thine eyes did see my substance being yet imperfect . . . look well if there be any wickedness in me; and lead me in the way everlasting . . . haste thee unto me . . . when I cry unto thee.  O let not my heart be inclined to an evil thing.”

She was startled by a general movement throughout the congregation.  The minister had advanced to the reading desk and begun to read: 

“I will arise and go to my father and will say unto him:  Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee and am no more worthy to be called thy son.”

Ages stretched their human wastes between these words of the New Testament and those other words of the Old; but the parable of Christ really finished the prayer of David:  in each there was the same young prodigal—­the ever-falling youth of humanity.

Another moment and the whole congregation knelt and began the confession.  Isabel also from long custom sank upon her knees and started to repeat the words, “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.”  Then she stopped.  She declined to make that confession with Rowan or to join in any service that he shared and appropriated.