if she should let him know of her presence, or if it might not be better to slip out unnoticed, when in a moment he had risen and was swinging with a vigorous step up the little corkscrew stairway of the pulpit.  There he stood, facing the silence, facing the flower-starred shadows, the empty spaces; facing her, but not seeing her.  And the girl forgot herself and the question of her going as she saw the look in his face, the light which comes at times to those who give their lives to holiness, since the day when the people, gazing at Stephen, the martyr, “saw his face as it had been the face of an angel.”  When his voice floated out on the dim, sunny atmosphere it rested as lightly on the silence as if the notes of an organ rolled through its own place.  He spoke a prayer of a service which, to those whose babyhood has been consecrated by it, whose childhood and youth have listened to its simple and stately words, whose manhood and womanhood have been carried over many a hard place by the lift of its familiar sentences,—­he spoke a prayer of that service which is less dear only, to those bred in it, than the voices of their dearest.  As a priest begins to speak to his congregation he began, and the hearer in the shadow of the gallery listened, awed: 

“The Lord is in His holy temple:  let all the earth keep silence before Him.”

And in the little church was silence as if all the earth obeyed.  The collect for the day came next, and a bit of jubilant Easter service, and then his mind seemed to drift back to the sentences with which the prayer-book opens.

“This is the day which the Lord hath made,” the ringing voice announced.  “Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”  And then, stabbing into the girl’s fevered conscience, “I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.”  It was as if an inflexible judge spoke the words for her.  “When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive,” the pure, stern tones went on.

She was not turning away from wickedness; she did not mean to turn away; she would not do that which was lawful.  The girl shivered.  She could not hear this dreadful accusal from the very pulpit.  She must leave this place.  And with that the man, as if in a sudden passion of feeling, had tossed his right hand high above him; his head was thrown back; his eyes shone up into the shadows of the roof as if they would pierce material things and see Him who reigned; he was pleading as if for his life, pleading for his brothers, for human beings who sin and suffer.

“O Lord,” he prayed, “spare all those who confess their sins unto Thee, that they whose consciences by sin are accused, by Thy merciful pardon may be absolved; through Christ our Lord.”  And suddenly he was using the very words which had come to her of themselves a few minutes before.  “Deal not with us according to our sins—­deal not with us,” he repeated, as if wresting forgiveness for his fellows from the Almighty.  “Deal not with us according to our sins, neither reward us according to our iniquities.”  And while the echo of the words yet held the girl motionless he was gone.