With whatsoever other feelings she had sought the church, it was at least with the hope that it had a message for her.  She had indeed listened to a personal message, but it was a message delivered to the wrong person; for at every stage of the worship she, the innocent, had been forgotten and slighted; Rowan, the guilty, had been considered and comforted.  David had his like in mind and besought pardon for him; the prophet of old knew of a case like his and blessed him; the apostle centuries afterward looked on and did not condemn; Christ himself had in a way told the multitude the same story that Rowan had told her,—­counselling forgiveness.  The very hymns of the church were on Rowan’s side—­every one gone in search of the wanderer.  For on this day Religion, universal mother of needy souls and a minister of all comforts, was in the mood to deal only with youth and human frailty.

She rebelled.  It was like commanding her to dishonor a woman’s strongest and purest instincts.  It called upon her to sympathize with the evil that had blighted her life.  And Rowan himself!—­in her anger and suffering she could think of him in no other way than as enjoying this immortal chorus of anxiety on his account; as hearing it all with complacency and self-approval.  It had to her distorted imagination the effect of offering a reward to him for having sinned; he would have received no such attention had he remained innocent.

With one act of complete revulsion she spurned it all:  the moral casuistry that beguiled him, the church that cloaked him; spurned psalm and prophet and apostle, Christ and parable and song.

“Grandmother,” she whispered, “I shall not wait for the sermon.”

A moment later she issued from the church doors and took her way slowly homeward through the deserted streets, under the lonely blue of the unanswering sky.

III

The Conyers homestead was situated in a quiet street on the southern edge of the town.  All the houses in that block had been built by people of English descent near the close of the eighteenth or at the beginning of the nineteenth century.  Each was set apart from each by lawns, yards and gardens, and further screened by shrubs and vines in accordance with old English custom.  Where they grew had once been the heart of a wilderness; and above each house stood a few old forest trees, indifferent guardsmen of the camping generations.

The architects had given to the buildings good strong characters; the family living in each for a hundred years or more had long since imparted reputation.  Out of the windows girlish brides had looked on reddening springs and whitening winters until they had become silver-haired grandmothers themselves; then had looked no more; and succeeding eyes had watched the swift pageants of the earth, and the swifter pageants of mortal hope and passion.  Out of the front doors,