The hymn concluded, Damaris knelt, while Reginald Sawyer, having mounted into the pulpit, read the invocation; mechanically rose from her knees with the rest, and disposed herself in the inner corner of the pew, sitting sideways so that her left hand might rest upon the carven marble margin of the tomb.  She liked touch of it still, in the quietude of her great content, cherishing a pretty fancy of the knight and his lady’s sympathy and that also of their sprightly little footstool dog.

Otherwise she was deaf to outward things, deliciously oblivious, wrapped away sweetly within herself.  Hence she quite failed to notice how awkwardly Sawyer stumbled, treading on the fronts of his long surplice when going up the pulpit stairs.  How he fumbled with his manuscript as he flattened it out on the cushioned desk.  Or how husky was his voice, to the point of the opening sentences being almost inaudible.  The young clergyman suffered, indeed, so it appeared, from a painfully excessive fit of nervousness.  All this she missed, not awakening from her state of blissful trance until the sermon had been under way some good five to ten minutes.

Her awakening even then was gradual.  It was also unpleasant.  It began in vague and uneasy suspicion of something unusual and agitating toward.  In consciousness of a hushed and strained attention, very foreign to the customary placid, not to say bovine, indifference of the ordinary country congregation.  The preacher’s voice was audible enough now, in good truth, though still under insufficient control.  It roared, cracked upward, approaching a scream.  Sentences trod on one another’s heels, so rapid was his delivery; or bumped and jolted so overlaid was it with emphasis.  He, dealt in ugly words, too—­“lies, drunkenness, theft, profanity;” and worse still, “uncleanness, adultery, carnal debauchery.”  For not venial sins only, but mortal sins likewise were rife in Deadham, as he averred, matters of common knowledge and everyday occurrence—­tolerated if not openly encouraged, callously winked at.  The public conscience could hardly be said to exist, so indurated was it, so moribund through lack of stimulation and through neglect.  Yet such wickedness, sooner or later, must call down the vengeance of an offended God.  It would be taken upon these lawbreakers.  Here or hereafter these evil-livers would receive the chastisement their deeds invited and deserved.  Let no man deceive himself.  God is just.  He is also very terrible in judgment.  Hell yawns for the impenitent.

Breathless, he paused; and a subdued sigh, an instinctive shuffling of feet ran through the assembly.—­Yet these were but generalities after all, often heard before, when you came to think, though seldom so forcibly put.  Every man made liberal gift of such denunciations to his neighbours, rather than applied their lesson to himself.  But Reginald Sawyer was merely gathering energy, gathering courage for more detailed assault.