Yet the service went on.  The people knelt.

“’Almighty and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.  We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts’”—­

Thus far the rector’s voice had led, but here it sank, and the old General’s, in a measure, took its place.

Then it rose again, in the confession, “There is no health in us,” and in the supplication, “Have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.”

There once more it failed, while the people, faltering with distress, repeated, “That we may hereafter lead a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name.  Amen.”

At this the farmer with the spectacled daughter stepped nimbly over the rail and caught Arthur as he rose and staggered.  Leonard was hurrying forward, and half the people kneeling, half standing, when Mrs. Morris vacantly stopped his way with a face so aghast and words so confused that he had to give her over to Ruth.  Then he hastened on to where Arthur was being led into the vestry by his physician and others.

But now he was turned back by the doctor, requesting him to dismiss the congregation; which he did, with the physician’s assurance that the trouble was no more than vertigo, and that Arthur was even now quite able to proceed home in the farmer vestryman’s rockaway.  The people noticed that the physician went with him.

Mrs. Morris followed on foot with the farmer’s daughter, and with Ruth and the General, and Leonard went into town to telegraph Isabel, in her mother’s name, to come home.  As he was starting, Mrs. Morris drew Ruth aside and whispered something about Godfrey.  To which Ruth softly replied, with an affectionate twist in her smile, “It couldn’t hurry him; he’s already on the way.”

In the room next that in which her son-in-law lay asleep under anodynes the little mother’s odd laugh was turned all to moan.  “Oh!—­ho—­ho!” she sighed in solitude, “if Arthur could have learned from Godfrey how to wait, or even if Isabel could but have learned from Ruth how to keep one waiting!”

She paused at a window that looked over the garden and into the street.  Leonard passed.  She turned quickly away, only sighing again, “Oh!—­ho—­ho!” Her thought might have been kinder had she known he was stabbing himself at every step with blame of all this woe.

“I ought to have foreseen,” was his constant silent cry.  “I am the one who ought to have foreseen.”

Lack of Sunday trains and two failures to connect kept Isabel from arriving until nightfall of the third day, Wednesday.  Arthur knew Mrs. Morris had telegraphed for her; but to him that was only part of the play under which he thought he and she were hiding the frightful truth.

On this day he had so outwitted his village physician as to be given the freedom for which he ravened; liberty to take the air in his garden, as understood by the doctor, but by him liberty to stand guard down at the edge of that dark pool which would not freeze over,—­liberty to take an air sweet with the odors of the parting year, but crowded also with distended eyes and strangling groans.