Accordingly, a few minutes before that hour, Mr. Gresley and his party entered the Parish Room.  It was crammed.  The back benches were filled with a large contingent of young men, whose half-sheepish, half-sullen expression showed that their presence was due to pressure.  Why the parishioners had come in such numbers it would be hard to say.  Perhaps even a temperance meeting was a change in the dreary monotony of rural life at Warpington.  Many of the faces bore the imprint of this monotony, Rachel thought, as she refused the conspicuous front seat pointed out to her by Mrs. Gresley, and sat down near the door with Hester.

Dick, who had been finishing his cigarette outside, entered a moment later, and stood in the gangway, entirely filling it up, his eye travelling over the assembly, and, as Rachel well knew, looking for her.  Presently he caught sight of her, wedged in four or five deep by the last arrivals.  There was a vacant space between her and the wall, but it was apparently inaccessible.  Entirely disregarding the anxious church-wardens who were waving him forward, Dick disappeared among the young men at the back, and Rachel thought no more of him until a large Oxford shoe descended quietly out of space upon the empty seat near her, and Dick, who had persuaded the young men to give him foot-room on their seats, and had stepped over the high backs of several “school forms,” sat down beside her.

It was neatly done, and Rachel could not help smiling.  But the thought darted through her mind that Dick was the kind of man who, somehow or other, would succeed where he meant to succeed, and would marry the woman he intended to marry.  There was no doubt that she was that woman, and as he sat tranquilly beside her she wished, with a nervous tremor, that his choice had fallen on some one else.

The meeting opened with nasal and fervent prayer on the part of a neighboring Archdeacon.  No one could kneel down except the dignitaries on the platform, but every one pretended to do so.  Mr. Pratt, who was in the chair, then introduced the principal speaker.  Mr. Pratt’s face, very narrow at the forehead, became slightly wider at the eyes, widest when it reached round the corners of the mouth, and finally split into two long, parti-colored whiskers.  He assumed on these occasions a manner of pontifical solemnity towards his “humble brethren,” admirably suited to one who, after wrestling for many years with a patent oil, is conscious that he has blossomed out into a “county family.”

The Warpington parishioners listened to him unmoved.

The deputation from Liverpool followed, a thin, ascetic-looking man of many bones and little linen, who spoke with the concentrated fury of a fanatic against alcohol in all its varieties.  Dick, who had so far taken more interest in Rachel’s gloves, which she had dropped, and with which he was kindly burdening himself, than in the proceedings, drew himself up and fixed his steel eyes on the speaker.