in it like the fall of water, that thrilled along the nerves.  “Who am I that ask you?  A poor weak woman, ignorant, unknown.  Never mind.  It is not my voice, but the voice in your heart that entreats you, ‘Come and be saved!’ You know that voice, it speaks in the watches of the night; it began to speak when you were a little, little child, with little joys and sorrows, and little prayers that you have forgotten now.  Oh, it is a sweet voice, a tender voice”—­her own had dropped to the cooing of doves—­“It is hard to know why all the winds do not carry it, and all the leaves whisper it!  Strange, strange!  But the world is full of the clamour of its own foolishness, and the Voice is lost in it, except in places where people come to pray, as here to-night, and in those night watches.  You hear it now in the echo from my lips, ‘Come and be saved.’  Why must I beg of you?  Why do you not come hastening, running?  Are you too wise?  But when did the wisdom of this world satisfy you about the next?  Are you too much occupied?  But in the day of judgment what will you do?”—­

    “When you come to Jordan’s flood,
     How will you do?  How will you do?”

It was the voice and tambourine of Ensign Sand, quick upon her opportunity.  Laura gave her no glance of surprise—­perhaps she was disciplined to interruptions—­but caught up her own tambourine, singing, and instantly the chorus was general, the big drum thumping out the measure, all the tambourines shaking together.

    “You who now contemn your God,
     How will you do?  How will you do?”

The Duke’s Own sang lustily, with a dogged enjoyment that made little of the words.  Some of them assumed a vacuity to counteract the sentiment, but most of the sheepish countenances expressed that the tune was the thing, one or two with a smile of jovial cynicism, and kept time with their feet.  Through the medley of voices—­everybody sang except Arnold and Lindsay and the Chinaman—­Laura’s seemed to flow, separate and clear, threading the jangle upon melody, and turning the doggerel into an appeal, direct, intense.  When Lindsay presently saw it addressed to him, in the unmistakable intention of her eyes, he caught his breath.

“Death will be a solemn day
When the soul is forced away,
It will be too late to pray;

              How will you do?”

It was simple enough.  All her supreme desire, to convince, to turn, to make awfully plain, had centred upon the single person in the room with whom she had the advantage of acquaintance, whose face her own could seek with a kind of right to response.  But the sensation Duff Lindsay tried to sit still under was not simple.  It had the novelty, the shock, of a plunge into the sea; behind his decorous countenance he gasped and blinked, with unfamiliar sounds in his ears.  His soul seemed shudderingly repelling Laura’s, yet the buffets themselves were enthralling.