Lawrence Newt did not look round for Aunt Martha.  But he thought of her listening to the discourse, as one thinks of dry fields in a saturating summer rain.  She sat through the whole—­black, immovable, silent.  The people near her looked at her compassionately.  They thought she was an inconsolable widow, or a Rachel refusing comfort.  Nor, had they watched her, could they have told if she had heard any thing to comfort or relieve her sorrow.  From the first word to the last she gazed fixedly at the speaker.  With the rest she rose and went out.  But as she passed by the pulpit stairs she looked up for a moment at that pallid face, and a finer eye than any human saw that she longed, like another woman of old looking at another teacher, to kiss the hem of his garment.  Oh! not by earthquake nor by lightning, but by the soft touch of angels at midnight, is the stone rolled away from the door of the sepulchre.

CHAPTER XLVI.

IN ANOTHER CHURCH.

While thus one body of Christian believers worshipped, another was assembled in the Methodist chapel in John Street, where Aunt Martha usually went.

A vast congregation crowded every part of the church.  They swarmed upon the pulpit stairs, upon the gallery railings, and wherever a foot could press itself to stand, or room be found to sit.  As the young preacher, Summerfield, rose in the pulpit, every eye in the throng turned to him and watched his slight, short figure—­his sweet blue eye, and his face of earnest expression and a kind of fiery sweetness.  He closed his eyes and lifted his hands in prayer; and the great responsibility of speaking to that multitude of human beings of their most momentous interests evidently so filled and possessed him, that in the prayer he seemed to yearn for strength and the gifts of grace so earnestly—­he cried, so as if his heart were bursting, “Help, Lord, or I perish!” that the great congregation, murmuring with sobs, with gasps and sighs, echoed solemnly, as if it had but one voice, and it were muffled in tears, “Help, Lord, or I perish!”

When the prayer was ended a hymn was sung by all the people, to a quick, martial melody, and seemed to leave them nervously awake to whatever should be said.  The preacher, with the sweet boyish face, began his sermon gently, and in a winning voice.  There was a kind of caressing persuasion in his whole manner that magnetized the audience.  He grew more and more impassioned as he advanced, while the people sat open-mouthed, and responding at intervals, “Amen!”

“Ah! sinner, sinner, it is he, our God, who shoots us through and through with the sharp sweetness of his power.  It is our God who scatters the arrows of his wrath; but they are winged with the plumes of the dove, the feathers of softness, and the Gospel.  Oh! the promises! the promises!—­Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Yes, patriarch of white hairs,