This is a fair specimen of the way in which Miss Wilbur buzzed through that meeting—­that wonderful meeting, that Flossy Shipley will remember all her life.  She made no answer to Marion’s comments after a little, and the pink flush glowed deeper on her face.  She was wonderfully interested—­indeed she was more than interested.  There was a strange feeling of pain at her heart, a sort of sick, longing feeling that she had never felt before, to understand what all these people meant, to feel as they seemed to feel.

The Christian world is more to blame for the unspoken infidelity that thrives in its circles than is generally supposed.  Flossy Shipley had been in many religious meetings, but she had really never in her life before been among a large gathering of cultured people, who were eager and excited and happy, and the cause for that eagerness and that happiness been found in the religion of Jesus Christ.  I do not say that there had never been such meetings before, nor that there have not been many of them.  I simply say that it was a new revelation to Flossy, and she had been to the church prayer-meeting at home several times.  Whether that church may have been peculiar or not I do not say, but Flossy had certainly failed to get the idea that prayer-meetings were blessed places; that the people who went there from week to week found their joy and their rest and their comfort there.  She began to have an unutterable sense of want and longing creeping over her; she stole shy glances at Marion to see if she felt this, but Marion was absorbed just then in catching the speaker’s last sentence and writing it down.  Her face expressed nothing but business earnestness.  Speech-making concluded, there came the “covenant service.”

“I wonder what that is supposed to be?” whispered Marion.  “It sounds like something dreadfully solemn.  I hope they are not going to have any scenes.  Revivals are not fashionable except in the winter.”

“Marion, don’t!” Flossy said, in an earnest undertone.  The gay, and what for the first time struck her as the sacrilegious words, chilled her.  And for almost the first time in her life she uttered an unhesitating remonstrance.  Something in the tone surprised Marion, and she looked curiously down at her little companion, but said not another word.

The covenant service was the simplest of all services; in fact, only the singing of a familiar hymn and the offering of a prayer.  But the hymn was read first, in such solemn, tender, pleading tones as it seemed to Flossy she had never heard before; and the singing rolled around that great tent like the voices of the ten thousand who sing before the throne—­at least to Flossy’s heart it seemed like that.  The prayer that followed was the simplest of all prayers as to words, and the briefest public prayer she ever remembered to have heard, and it made her feel as nothing in life had ever done before.  She did not understand the cause for her emotion; she was