The Commandments now remained and for the first time she shrank from them as being so awful and so near.  All our lives we placidly say over to ourselves that man is mortal; but not until death knocks at the threshold and enters do we realize the terrors of our mortality.  All our lives we repeat with dull indifference that man is erring; but only when the soul most loved and trusted has gone astray, do we begin to realize the tragedy of human imperfection.  So Isabel had been used to go through the service, with bowed head murmuring at each response, “Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law.”

But the laws themselves had been no more to her than pious archaic statements, as far removed as the cherubim, the candlesticks and the cedar of Solomon’s temple.  If her thoughts had been forced to the subject, she would have perhaps admitted the necessity of these rules for men and women ages ago.  Some one of them might have meant much to a girl in those dim days:  to Rebecca pondering who knows what temptation at the well; to Ruth tempted who knows how in the corn and thinking of Boaz and the barn; to Judith plotting in the camp; to Jephtha’s daughter out on the wailing mountains.

But to-day, sitting in an Episcopal church in the closing years of the nineteenth century, holding a copy of those old laws, and thinking of Rowan as the breaker of the greatest of them, Isabel for the first time awoke to realization of how close they are still—­those voices from the far land of Shinar; how all the men and women around her in that church still waged their moral battles over those few texts of righteousness; how the sad and sublime wandering caravans of the whole race forever pitch their nightly tents beneath that same mountain of command.

Thick and low sounded the response of the worshippers.  She could hear her grandmother’s sonorous voice, a mingling of worldly triumph and indifference; her aunt’s plaintive and aggrieved.  She could hear Kate’s needy and wounded.  In imagination she could hear his proud, noble mother’s; his younger brother’s.  Against the sound of his responses she closed all hearing; and there low on her knees, in the ear of Heaven itself, she recorded against him her unforgiveness and her dismissal forever.

An organ melody followed, thrillingly sweet; and borne outward on it the beseeching of the All-Merciful: 

  “’Art thou weary, art thou languid,
    Art thou sore distressed? 
  Come to me!’ saith one; ’and, coming,
    Be at rest!’”

It was this hymn that brought her in a passion to her feet.