“I’m tired almost to death,” says Mrs. Edwards, “We have been house-cleaning all the week, and it is such a trial, with inefficient help.  I wouldn’t have come to church at all to-day but the weather was so lovely, and we have so few days in this climate when one can wear anything decent it seemed a pity to lose one.  Have you finished house-cleaning?”

At the foot of the stairs Miss Lily Harrison meets the soprano singer.

“Oh, Lorena!” she exclaims, “your voice was just perfectly divine this morning.  Let me tell you what Jim said, when you went up on the high notes of the anthem.  He leaned over and whispered to me, ’The angels can’t go ahead of that, I know; irreverent fellow!—­Lorena, what a perfect match your silk is!  Where did you succeed so well?  I was dying to see that dress!  I told mamma if it were not for the first sight of that dress, and of Laura’s face when she saw it was so much more elegant than hers, I should have been tempted to take a nap this morning instead of coming to church.  However, I got a delicious one as it was.  Weren’t you horribly sleepy?”

At this point Misses Lily and Lorena are joined by the said “Jim.”  And be it noticed that he makes the first remark on the sermon that has been heard as yet.

“We had a stunning sermon this morning, didn’t we?”

“Oh, you shocking fellow!” murmurs Lorena “How can you use such rough words?”

“What words!’ Stunning?’ Why, dear me, that is a jolly word; so expressive.  I say, you sheep in this fold took it pretty hard.  A fellow might be almost glad of being a goat, I think.”

“Jim, don’t be wicked,” puts in Miss Lily who has a cousinship in the said Jim, and therefore can afford to be brusque.  Jim shrugs his shoulders.

“Wicked,” he says.  “If the preacher is to be credited, it is you folks who are wicked.  I don’t pretend, you know, to be anything else.”

A change of subject seems to the fair Lorena to be desirable, so she says: 

“Why were you not at the hop last night, Mr. Merchant?”

And Jim replies, “I didn’t get home in time.  I was at the races.  I hear you had a stunning—­I beg your pardon—­a perfectly splendid time.  Those are the right words, I believe.”

And then the two ladies gathered their silken trains into an aristocratic grasp of the left hand, and sailed down town on either side of “Jim” to continue the conversation.  And those coral lips had but just sung—­

“My thoughts lie open to the Lord,
Before they’re formed within;
And ere my lips pronounce the word
He knows the sense I mean.”

What could He have thought of her?  Is it not strange that she did not ask this of herself.

“How are you to-day?” Mr. Jackson asked, shaking his old acquaintance, Mr. Dunlap, heartily by the hand.  “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

Now, what will be the next sentence from the lips of those gray-headed men, standing in the sanctuary, with the echo of solemn service still in their ears?  Listen: