“I won’t have time to read it all through, I s’pose,” he said, “but I’ll get along as far as I can.”

There was no preaching in Carlisle that day, and Sunday School was not till the evening.  Cecily got out her Lesson Slip and studied the lesson conscientiously.  The rest of us did not see how she could do it.  We could not, that was very certain.

“If it isn’t the Judgment Day, I want to have the lesson learned,” she said, “and if it is I’ll feel I’ve done what was right.  But I never found it so hard to remember the Golden Text before.”

The long dragging hours were hard to endure.  We roamed restlessly about, and went to and fro—­all save Peter, who still steadily read away at his Bible.  He was through Genesis by eleven and beginning on Exodus.

“There’s a good deal of it I don’t understand,” he said, “but I read every word, and that’s the main thing.  That story about Joseph and his brother was so int’resting I almost forgot about the Judgment Day.”

But the long drawn out dread was beginning to get on Dan’s nerves.

“If it is the Judgment Day,” he growled, as we went in to dinner, “I wish it’d hurry up and have it over.”

“Oh, Dan!” cried Felicity and Cecily together, in a chorus of horror.  But the Story Girl looked as if she rather sympathized with Dan.

If we had eaten little at breakfast we could eat still less at dinner.  After dinner the clouds rolled away, and the sun came joyously and gloriously out.  This, we thought, was a good omen.  Felicity opined that it wouldn’t have cleared up if it was the Judgment Day.  Nevertheless, we dressed ourselves carefully, and the girls put on their white dresses.

Sara Ray came up, still crying, of course.  She increased our uneasiness by saying that her mother believed the Enterprise paragraph, and was afraid that the end of the world was really at hand.

“That’s why she let me come up,” she sobbed.  “If she hadn’t been afraid I don’t believe she would have let me come up.  But I’d have died if I couldn’t have come.  And she wasn’t a bit cross when I told her I had gone to the magic lantern show.  That’s an awful bad sign.  I hadn’t a white dress, but I put on my white muslin apron with the frills.”

“That seems kind of queer,” said Felicity doubtfully.  “You wouldn’t put on an apron to go to church, and so it doesn’t seems as if it was proper to put it on for Judgment Day either.”

“Well, it’s the best I could do,” said Sara disconsolately.  “I wanted to have something white on.  It’s just like a dress only it hasn’t sleeves.”

“Let’s go into the orchard and wait,” said the Story Girl.  “It’s one o’clock now, so in another hour we’ll know the worst.  We’ll leave the front door open, and we’ll hear the big clock when it strikes two.”

No better plan being suggested, we betook ourselves to the orchard, and sat on the boughs of Uncle Alec’s tree because the grass was wet.  The world was beautiful and peaceful and green.  Overhead was a dazzling blue sky, spotted with heaps of white cloud.