Her gaze had been upon him since he passed the minister’s pew, where she stood between my Lady Squander’s ex-waiting-woman and the branded schoolmaster, but now their eyes came full together.  She was dressed in some coarse dark stuff, above which rose the brown pillar of her throat and the elusive, singular beauty of her face.  There was a flower in her hair, placed as he had placed the rosebuds.  A splendor leaped into her eyes, but her cheek did not redden; it was to his face that the color rushed.  They had but a moment in which to gaze at each other, for the singing, which to her, at least, had seemed suddenly to swell into a great ascending tide of sound, with somewhere, far away, the silver calling of a trumpet, now came to an end, and with another silken rustle and murmur the congregation sat down.

Haward did not turn again, and the service went drowsily on.  Darden was bleared of eye and somewhat thick of voice; the clerk’s whine was as sleepy a sound as the buzzing of the bees in and out of window, or the soft, incessant stir of painted fans.  A churchwarden in the next pew nodded and nodded, until he nodded his peruke awry, and a child went fast asleep, with its head in its mother’s lap.  One and all worshiped somewhat languidly, with frequent glances at the hourglass upon the pulpit.  They prayed for King George the First, not knowing that he was dead, and for the Prince, not knowing that he was King.  The minister preached against Quakers and witchcraft, and shook the rafters with his fulminations.  Finally came the benediction and a sigh of relief.

In that country and time there was no unsociable and undignified scurrying homeward after church.  Decorous silence prevailed until the house was exchanged for the green and shady churchyard:  but then tongues were loosened, and the flower-bed broken into clusters.  One must greet one’s neighbors; present or be presented to what company might be staying at the various great houses within the parish; talk, laugh, coquet, and ogle; make appointments for business or for pleasure; speak of the last horse-race, the condition of wheat and tobacco, and the news brought in by the Valour, man-of-war, that the King was gone to Hanover.  In short, for the nonce, the churchyard became a drawing-room, with the sun for candles, with no painted images of the past and gone upon the walls, but with the dead themselves beneath the floor.

The minister, having questions to settle with clerk and sexton, tarried in the vestry room; but his wife, with Audrey and the schoolmaster, waited for him outside, in the shade of an oak-tree that was just without the pale of the drawing-room.  Mistress Deborah, in her tarnished amber satin and ribbons that had outworn their youth, bit her lip and tapped her foot upon the ground.  Audrey watched her apprehensively.  She knew the signs, and that when they reached home a storm might break that would leave its mark upon her shoulders.  The minister’s wife was not