Hilda’s mind was a curious study during that sermon.  At first, as her lover’s rather close-cropped, dark-haired head appeared in sight, she had studied him with an odd mixture of pride and apprehension.  She held her hymn-book, but she did not need it, and she watched surreptitiously while he opened the Bible, arranged some papers, and, in accordance with custom, knelt to pray.  She began to think half-thoughts of the days that might be, when perhaps she would be the wife of the Rector of some St. John’s, and later, possibly, of a Bishop.  Peter had it in him to go far, she knew.  She half glanced round with a self-conscious feeling that people might be guessing at her thoughts, and then back, wondering suddenly if she really knew the man, or only the minister.  And then there came the rustle of shutting books and of people composing themselves to listen, the few coughs, the vague suggestion of hassocks and cushions being made comfortable.  And then, in a moment, almost with the giving out of the text, the sudden stillness and that tense sensation which told that the young orator had gripped his congregation.

Thereafter she hardly heard him, as it were, and she certainly lost the feeling of ownership that had been hers before.  As he leaned over the pulpit, and the words rang out almost harshly from their intensity, she began to see, as the rest of the congregation began to see, the images that the preacher conjured up before her.  A sense of coming disaster riveted her—­the feeling that she was already watching the end of an age.

“Jesus had compassion on the multitude”—­that had been the short and simple text.  Simple words, the preacher had said, but how when one realised Who had had compassion, and on what?  Almighty God Himself, with His incarnate Mind set on the working out of immense and agelong plans, had, as it were, paused for a moment to have compassion on hungry women and crying babies and folk whose petty confused affairs could have seemed of no consequence to anyone in the drama of the world.  And then, with a few terse sentences, the preacher swung from that instance to the world drama of to-day.  Did they realise, he asked, that peaceful bright Sunday morning, that millions of simple men were at that moment being hurled at each other to maim and kill?  At the bidding of powers that even they could hardly visualise, at the behest of world politics that not one in a thousand would understand and scarcely any justify, houses were being broken up, women were weeping, and children playing in the sun before cottage doors were even now being left fatherless.  It was incredible, colossal, unimaginable, but as one tried to picture it, Hell had opened her mouth and Death gone forth to slay.  It was terrible enough that battlefields of stupendous size should soon be littered with the dying and the dead, but the aftermath of such a war as this would be still more terrible.  No one could say how near it would come to them all.  No one could tell what revolution in morals and social order such a war as this might not bring.  That day God Himself looked down on the multitude as sheep having no shepherd, abandoned to be butchered by the wolves, and His heart beat with a divine compassion for the infinite sorrows of the world.