“It was very kind of you,” said Theron.  “I am really extremely grateful to you.”  He shook her by the hand to make up for what he realized to be a lack of fervor in his tones.

“Well, then,” Sister Soulsby replied, “you pull yourself together, and take your place as chairman of the trustees’ meeting, and see to it that, whatever comes up, you side with old Pierce and Winch.”

“Oh, they’re my friends now, are they?” asked Theron, with a faint play of irony about his lips.

“Yes, that’s your ticket this election,” she answered briskly, “and mind you vote it straight.  Don’t bother about reasons now.  Just take it from me, as the song says, ‘that things have changed since Willie died.’  That’s all.  And then come back here, and this afternoon we’ll have a good old-fashioned jaw.”

The Rev. Mr. Ware, walking with ostentatious feebleness, and forcing a conventional smile upon his wan face, duly made his unexpected appearance at the trustees’ meeting in one of the smaller classrooms.  He received their congratulations gravely, and shook hands with all three.  It required an effort to do this impartially, because, upon sight of Levi Gorringe, there rose up suddenly within him an emotion of fierce dislike and enmity.  In some enigmatic way his thoughts had kept themselves away from Gorringe ever since Sunday evening.  Now they concentrated with furious energy and swiftness upon him.  Theron seemed able in a flash of time to coordinate many recollections of Gorringe—­the early liking Alice had professed for him, the mystery of those purchased plants in her garden, the story of the girl he had lost in church, his offer to lend him money, the way in which he had sat beside Alice at the love-feast and followed her to the altar-rail in the evening.  These raced abreast through the young minister’s brain, yet with each its own image, and its relation to the others clearly defined.

He found the nerve, all the same, to take this third trustee by the hand, and to thank him for his congratulations, and even to say, with a surface smile of welcome, “It is brother Gorringe, now, I remember.”

The work before the meeting was chiefly of a routine kind.  In most places this would have been transacted by the stewards; but in Octavius these minor officials had degenerated into mere ceremonial abstractions, who humbly ratified, or by arrangement anticipated, the will of the powerful, mortgage-owning trustees.  Theron sat languidly at the head of the table while these common-place matters passed in their course, noting the intonations of Gorringe’s voice as he read from his secretary’s book, and finding his ear displeased by them.  No issue arose upon any of these trivial affairs, and the minister, feeling faint and weary in the heat, wondered why Sister Soulsby had insisted on his coming.