Her spiritual struggle was not ended by her going dutifully to meeting with her aunt.  During all the long services of the morning she fought with her wandering attention to keep it upon the sacred words that were spoken and sung.  But her thoughts would not be controlled.  Straying like a wicked imp into forbidden paths, her fancy followed the envied ones into the soft, cool shadows of the autumn woods and along the banks of the beautiful Conestoga, and mingling with the gentle murmuring of the leaves and the rippling of the water, she heard that resonant voice, so unlike any voice she had ever heard before, and that little abrupt laugh with its odd falsetto note, which haunted her like a strain of music; and she saw, in the sunlight of the lovely October morning, against a background of gold and brown leaves and silver water, the finely chiseled face, the thoughtful, pale forehead, the kind eyes, the capable white hands, of this most wonderful young man.

Tillie well understood that could the brethren and sisters know in what a worldly frame of mind she sat in the house of God this day, undoubtedly they would present her case for “discipline,” and even, perhaps, “set her back.”  But all the while that she tried to fight back the enemy of her soul, who thus subtly beset her with temptation to sin, she felt the utter uselessness of her struggle with herself.  For even when she did succeed in forcing her attention upon some of the hymns, it was in whimsical and persistent terms of the teacher that she considered them.  How was it possible, she wondered, for him, or any unconverted soul, to hear, without being moved to “give himself up,” such lines as these: 

     “He washed them all to make them clean,
     But Judas still was full of sin. 
     May none of us, like Judas, sell
     Our Lord for gold, and go to hell!”

And these: 

     “O man, remember, thou must die;
     The sentence is for you and I.
     Where shall we be, or will we go,
     When we must leave this world below?”

In the same moment that Tillie was wondering how a “Truth-Seeker” would feel under these searching words, she felt herself condemned by them for her wandering attention.

The young girl’s feelings toward the stranger at this present stage of their evolution were not, like those of Amanda and Rebecca, the mere instinctive feminine craving for masculine admiration.  She did not think of herself in relation to him at all.  A great hunger possessed her to know him—­all his thoughts, his emotions, the depths and the heights of him; she did not long, or even wish, that he might know and admire her.

The three-mile drive home from church seemed to Tillie, sitting in the high, old-fashioned buggy at her aunt’s side, an endless journey.  Never had old Dolly traveled so deliberately or with more frequent dead stops in the road to meditate upon her long-past youth.  Mrs. Wackernagel’s ineffectual slaps of the reins upon the back of the decrepit animal inspired in Tillie an inhuman longing to seize the whip and lash the feeble beast into a swift pace.  The girl felt appalled at her own feelings, so novel and inexplicable they seemed to her.  Whether there was more of ecstasy or torture in them, she hardly knew.