On and on glided the soft, subtle variations of the Motet, and gradually the strained expression of the shining eyes relaxed, as if the soul of the listener were drifting back from a far-off realm; the white lids quivered, the stern lines of the pale lips unbent.  At that moment, the face of her father seemed floating on the sunbeams that gilded the pulpit, and the tones of her mother’s voice rang in her ears.  The terrible tension of many days and nights of torture gave way suddenly, like a silver thread long taut, which snaps with one last vibration.  She raised her hands: 

“My God!  Why hast Thou forsaken me?”

The cry ended in a wail.  Into her burning eyes merciful tears rushed, and sinking on her knees she rested against the railing, shaken by a storm of passionate weeping.

Mrs. Singleton felt her own tears falling fast, but she played for a while longer; then stole out of the chapel, and sat down on the steps.

Across the grass plot before the door, burnished pigeons cooed, and trod their stately minuet, their iridescent plumage showing every opaline splendor as the sunlight smote them; and on a buttress of the clock tower, a lonely hedge-sparrow poured his heart out in that peculiarly pathetic threnody which no other feathered throat contributes to the varied volume of bird lays.  Poised on the point of an iron spike in the line that bristled along the wall, a mocking bird preened, then spread his wings, soared and finally swept downward, thrilling the air with the bravura of the “tumbling song”; and over the rampart that shut out the world, drifted the refrain of a paean to peace: 

“Bob White!” “Peas ripe?” “Not quite!”

In the vast epic of the Cosmos, evoked when the “Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”—­an epic printed in stars on blue abysses of illimitable space; in illuminated type of rose leaf, primrose petal, scarlet berry on the great greenery of field and forest; in the rainbows that glow on tropical humming birds, on Himalayan pheasants, on dying dolphins in purple seas; and in all the riotous carnival of color on Nature’s palette, from shifting glory of summer clouds, to the steady fires of red autumn skies—­we find no blot, no break, no blurred abortive passages, until man stepped into creation’s story.  In the material, physical Universe, the divine rhythm flows on, majestic, serene as when the “morning stars sing together” in the choral of praise to Him, unto whom “all seemed good”; but in the moral and spiritual realm evolved by humanity, what hideous pandemonium of discords drowns the heavenly harmony?  What grim havoc marks the swath, when the dripping scythe of human sin and crime swings madly, where the lilies of eternal “Peace on earth, good will to man,” should lift their silver chalices to meet the smile of God?

A vague conception of this vexing problem, which like a huge carnivorous spectre, flaps its dusky wings along the sky of sociology, now saddened Mrs. Singleton’s meditations, as she watched the lengthening shadow cast by the tower upon the court-yard; but she was not addicted to abstract speculation, and the words of her favorite hymn epitomized her thoughts:  “Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.”