“I don’t know yet.  I will see you at church.”

Thus they parted.

CHAPTER XXIV.

On Sabbath morning Beulah sat beside the window, with her folded hands resting on her lap.  The day was cloudless and serene; the sky of that intense melting blue which characterizes our clime.  From every quarter of the city brazen muezzins called worshipers to the temple, and bands of neatly clad, happy children thronged the streets, on their way to Sabbath school.  Save these, and the pealing bells, a hush pervaded all things, as though Nature were indeed “at her prayers.”  Blessed be the hallowed influences which every sunny Sabbath morn exerts!  Blessed be the holy tones which at least once a week call every erring child back to its Infinite Father!  For some time Beulah had absented herself from church, for she found that instead of profiting by sermons she came home to criticise and question.  But early associations are strangely tenacious, and, as she watched the children trooping to the house of God, there rushed to her mind memories of other years, when the orphan bands from the asylum regularly took their places in the Sabbath school.  The hymns she sang then rang again in her ears; long-forgotten passages of Scripture, repeated then, seemed learned but yesterday.  How often had the venerable superintendent knelt and invoked special guidance for the afflicted band from the God of orphans!  Now she felt doubly orphaned.  In her intellectual pride, she frequently asserted that she was “the star of her own destiny”; but this morning childish memories prattled of the Star of Bethlehem, before which she once bent the knee of adoration.  Had it set forever, amid clouds of superstition, sin, and infidelity?  Glittering spires pointed to the bending heavens, and answered:  “It burns on forever, ’brighter and brighter unto the perfect day’!” With a dull weight on her heart, she took down her Bible and opened it indifferently at her book-mark.  It proved the thirty-eighth chapter of Job, and she read on and on, until the bells warned her it was the hour of morning service.  She walked to church, not humbled and prepared to receive the holy teachings of revelation, but with a defiant feeling in her heart which she did not attempt or care to analyze.  She was not accustomed to attend Dr. Hew’s church, but the sexton conducted her to a pew, and as she seated herself the solemn notes of the organ swelled through the vaulted aisles.  The choir sang a magnificent anthem from Haydn’s “Creation,” and then only the deep, thundering peal of the organ fell on the dim, cool air.  Beulah could bear no more; as she lowered her veil, bitter tears gushed over her troubled face.  Just then she longed to fall on her knees before the altar and renew the vows of her childhood; but this impulse very soon died away, and, while the pews on every side rapidly filled, she watched impatiently for the appearance of the minister.