Audrey was not listening, was scarcely thinking.  Her hands were crossed in her lap, and now and then she raised one and made the motion of pushing aside from her eyes something heavy that clung and blinded.  What part of her spirit that was not wholly darkened and folded within itself was back in the mountains of her childhood, with those of her own blood whom she had loved and lost.  What use to try to understand to-day,—­to-day with its falling skies, its bewildered pondering over the words that were said to her last night?  And the morrow,—­she must leave that.  Perhaps when it should dawn he would come to her, and call her “little maid,” and laugh at her dreadful dream.  But now, while it was to-day, she could not think of him without an agony of pain and bewilderment.  He was ill, too, and suffering.  Oh, she must leave the thought of him alone!  Back then to the long yesterdays she traveled, and played quietly, dreamily, with Robin on the green grass beside the shining stream, or sat on the doorstep, her head on Molly’s lap, and watched the evening star behind the Endless Mountains.

It was very quiet in the church save for that one great voice speaking.  Little by little the voice impressed itself upon her consciousness.  The eyes of her mind were upon long ranges of mountains distinct against the splendor of a sunset sky.  Last seen in childhood, viewed now through the illusion of the years, the mountains were vastly higher than nature had planned them; the streamers of light shot to the zenith; the black forests were still; everywhere a fixed glory, a gigantic silence, a holding of the breath for things to happen.

By degrees the voice in her ears fitted in with the landscape, became, so solemn and ringing it was, like the voice of the archangel of that sunset land.  Audrey listened at last; and suddenly the mountains were gone, and the light from the sky, and her people were dead and dust away in that hidden valley, and she was sitting in the church at Williamsburgh, alone, without a friend.

What was the preacher saying?  What ball of the night before was he describing with bitter power, the while he gave warning of handwriting upon the wall such as had menaced Belshazzar’s feast of old?  Of what shameless girl was he telling,—­what creature dressed in silks that should have gone in rags, brought to that ball by her paramour—­

The gaunt figure in the pulpit trembled like a leaf with the passion of the preacher’s convictions and the energy of his utterance.  On had gone the stream of rhetoric, the denunciations, the satire, the tremendous assertions of God’s mind and purposes.  The lash that was wielded was far-reaching; all the vices of the age—­irreligion, blasphemy, drunkenness, extravagance, vainglory, loose living—­fell under its sting.  The condemnation was general, and each man looked to see his neighbor wince.  The occurrence at the ball last night,—­he was on that for final theme, was he?  There was