“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.  In the strangeness of it he made a mechanical movement to depart, picked up his stick, but Arnold was sitting holding his chin, wrapped in quiet interest, and took no notice.  The hymn stopped, and he found a few minutes’ respite, during which Ensign Sand addressed the meeting, unveiling each heart to its possessor; while Laura turned over the leaves of the hymn-book, looking, Lindsay was profoundly aware, for airs and verses most likely to help the siege of the Army to his untaken, sinful citadel.  There was time to bring him calmness enough to wonder whether these were the symptoms of emotional conversion, the sort of thing these people went in for, and he resolved to watch his state with interest.  Then, before he knew it, they were all down on their knees again, and Laura was praying; and he was not aware of the meaning of a single word that she said, only that her voice was threading itself in and out of his consciousness burdened with a passion that made it exquisite to him.  Her appeal lifted itself in the end into song, low and sweet.

     “Down at the Cross where my Saviour died,
      Down where for cleansing from sin I cried,
      There to my heart was the blood applied,
      Glory to His name!”