What followed seemed obviously restrained and modified by the effect of this unlooked-for and tranquillizing overture.  The Presiding Elder was known to enjoy visits to old-fashioned congregations like that of Octavius, where he could indulge to the full his inner passion for high-pitched passionate invocations and violent spiritual demeanor, but this time he spoke temperately, almost soothingly.  The most tempestuous of the local witnesses for the Lord gave in their testimony in relatively pacific tones, under the influence of the spell which good music had laid upon the gathering.  There was the deepest interest as to what the two visitors would do in this way.  Brother Soulsby spoke first, very briefly and in well rounded and well-chosen, if conventional, phrases.  His wife, following him, delivered in a melodious monotone some equally hackneyed remarks.  The assemblage, listening in rapt attention, felt the suggestion of reserved power in every sentence she uttered, and burst forth, as she dropped into her seat, in a loud chorus of approving ejaculations.  The Soulsbys had captured Octavius with their first outer skirmish line.

Everything seemed to move forward now with a new zest and spontaneity.  Theron had picked out for the occasion the best of those sermons which he had prepared in Tyre, at the time when he was justifying his ambition to be accounted a pulpit orator.  It was orthodox enough, but had been planned as the framework for picturesque and emotional rhetoric rather than doctrinal edification.  He had never dreamed of trying it on Octavius before, and only on the yesterday had quavered at his own daring in choosing it now.  Nothing but the desire to show Sister Soulsby what was in him had held him to the selection.

Something of this same desire no doubt swayed and steadied him now in the pulpit.  The labored slowness of his beginning seemed to him to be due to nervous timidity, until suddenly, looking down into those big eyes of Sister Soulsby’s, which were bent gravely upon him from where she sat beside Alice in the minister’s pew, he remembered that it was instead the studied deliberation which art had taught him.  He went on, feeling more and more that the skill and histrionic power of his best days were returning to him, were as marked as ever—­nay, had never triumphed before as they were triumphing now.  The congregation watched and listened with open, steadfast eyes and parted lips.  For the first time in all that weary quarter, their faces shone.  The sustaining sparkle of their gaze lifted him to a peroration unrivalled in his own recollection of himself.

He sat down, and bent his head forward upon the open Bible, breathing hard, but suffused with a glow of satisfaction.  His ears caught the music of that sighing rustle through the audience which bespeaks a profound impression.  He could scarcely keep the fingers of his hands, covering his bowed face in a devotional posture as they were, from drumming a jubilant tattoo.  His pulses did this in every vein, throbbing with excited exultation.  The insistent whim seized him, as he still bent thus before his people, to whisper to his own heart, “At last!—­The dogs!”