Mary Flaw went through this ritual, but on a smaller scale.  We all knelt down together, but when we rose from our knees, Miss Flaw was already standing up, and was pretending, without a sound, to sing a hymn; in the midst of our hymn, she sat down, opened her Bible, found a text, and then leaned back, her eyes fixed in space, listening to an imaginary sermon which our own real one soon caught up, and coincided with for about three-quarters of an hour.  Then, while our sermon went peacefully on, Miss Flaw would rise, and sing in silence (if I am permitted to use such an expression) her own visionary hymn; then she would kneel down and pray, then rise, collect her belongings, and sweep, in fairy majesty, out of the chapel, my Father still rounding his periods from the pulpit.  Nobody ever thought of preventing these movements, or of checking the poor creature in her innocent flightiness, until the evening of the great event.

It was all my own fault.  Mary Flaw had finished her imaginary service earlier than usual.  She had stood up alone with her hymn-book before her; she had flung herself on her knees alone, in the attitude of devotion; she had risen; she had seated herself for a moment to put on her gloves, and to collect her Bible, her hymn-book and her pocket-handkerchief in her reticule.  She was ready to start, and she looked around her with a pleasant air; my Father, all undisturbed, booming away meanwhile over our heads.  I know not why the manoeuvres of Miss Flaw especially attracted me that evening, but I leaned out across Miss Marks and I caught Miss Flaw’s eye.  She nodded, I nodded; and the amazing deed was done, I hardly know how.  Miss Flaw, with incredible swiftness, flew along the line, plucked me by the coat-collar from between my paralysed protectresses, darted with me down the chapel and out into the dark, before anyone had time to say ‘Jack Robinson’.

My Father gazed from the pulpit and the stream of exhortation withered on his lips.  No one in the body of the audience stirred; no one but himself had clearly seen what had happened.  Vague rows of ‘saints’ with gaping countenances stared up at him, while he shouted, ’Will nobody stop them? as we whisked out through the doorway.  Forth into the moist night we went, and up the lampless village, where, a few minutes later, the swiftest of the congregation, with my Father at their head, found us sitting on the doorstep of the butcher’s shop.  My captor was now quite quiet, and made no objection to my quitting her,—­’without a single kiss or a goodbye’, as the poet says.

Although I had scarcely felt frightened at the time, doubtless my nerves were shaken by this escapade, and it may have had something to do with the recurrence of the distressing visions from which I had suffered as a very little child.  These came back, with a force and expansion due to my increased maturity.  I had hardly laid my head down on the pillow, than, as it seemed to me, I was taking part in a mad gallop