“Oh, thank you.  Much obliged.”

Mr. Osborn, speaking from the pulpit, had said something to one of his young women, and she was leaning over the balustrade, smilingly offering Dale an open hymn-book.

“I am afraid,” she said, “that it’s very small print; but I dare say you have good eyes.”

She spoke in the most friendly natural manner, exactly as one speaks to a visitor when one is anxious to make him feel welcome and at home.  Dale, startled by this style of address in such a place, made a dignified bow.

“Give him this,” said Mr. Osborn, handing a book out of the pulpit.  “It’s a larger character—­’long primer,’ as I believe the printers call it.  We’ll have the lamps directly; but we are all of us rather partial to blind man’s holiday—­not to mention that oil is oil, and that Brother Spiers doesn’t give it away.  We know he couldn’t afford to do that.  But there it is—­Take care of the pence.”

To Dale’s astonishment, he heard a distinct chuckle here and there among the congregation.  Then the same young woman, having found the correct page, handed him the large-type book.  Then the man at the harmonium struck up, and the whole congregation burst into song.

They sang with a fervent strength that he had never heard equaled.  For a moment the powerful chorus seemed to shake the walls, to fill every cubic foot of air that the building contained, and then to go straight up, splitting the ugly roof, and out into the sky.  Otherwise this hymn would have left one no space to breathe in.  Dale felt a sudden rush of blood to the head, as if the pressure of vocal sound were about to produce suffocation; and at the same time he had the fantastic but almost irresistible idea that the whole congregation were singing solely at him, that they and their pastor had together planned to set him alone in this high place where he must bear the full brunt of the hymn while they all watched its effect upon him, and that the hymn itself had been specially and artfully chosen with a view to him and to nobody else.

      “Hail, sov’reign love, that first began
      The scheme to rescue fallen man! 
      Hail, matchless, free, eternal grace,
      That gave my soul a hiding-place.”

With his face turned as much as possible from the singers, he stood very stiff and erect, staring at the printed page.  Loudly as they had sung the first verse they seemed to sing the second verse more loudly.

      “Against the God that rules the sky,
      I fought with hand uplifted high;
      Despised His rich abounding grace,
      Too proud to seek a hiding-place.”

Dale braced himself, squared his shoulders and stood more erect than ever as they struck into the third verse.

They sang louder than before:  it seemed to him that they were screaming.

      “But thus th’ eternal counsel ran,
      ‘Almighty love, arrest that man!’”