For a second the perfume of the woman in front, mingling with other less definable odours, almost sickened her, evoking suggestions of tawdry, trivial, vulgar lives, fed on sensation and excitement; but the feeling was almost immediately swept away by a renewed sense of the bigness of the thing which she beheld,—­of which, indeed, she was a part.  And her thoughts turned more definitely to the man who had brought it all about.  Could he control it, subdue it?  Here was Opportunity suddenly upon him, like a huge, curving, ponderous wave.  Could he ride it? or would it crush him remorselessly?

Sensitive, alert, quickened as she was, she began to be aware of other values:  of the intense spiritual hunger in the eyes of the woman in black, the yearning of barren, hopeless existences.  And here and there Alison’s look fell upon more prosperous individuals whose expressions proclaimed incredulity, a certain cynical amusement at the spectacle:  others seemed uneasy, as having got more than they had bargained for, deliberating whether to flee . . . and then, just as her suspense was becoming almost unbearable, the service began. . . .

How it had been accomplished, the thing she later felt, was beyond the range of intellectual analysis.  Nor could she have told how much later, since the passage of time had gone unnoticed.  Curiosities, doubts, passions, longings, antagonisms—­all these seemed—­as the most natural thing in the world—­to have been fused into one common but ineffable emotion.  Such, at least, was the impression to which Alison startlingly awoke.  All the while she had been conscious of Hodder, from the moment she had heard his voice in the chancel; but somehow this consciousness of him had melted, imperceptibly, into that of the great congregation, once divided against itself, which had now achieved unity of soul.

The mystery as to how this had been effected was the more elusive when she considered the absence of all methods which might have been deemed revivalistic.  Few of those around her evinced a familiarity with the historic service.  And then occurred to her his explanation of personality as the medium by which all truth is revealed, by which the current of religion, the motive power in all history, is transmitted.  Surely this was the explanation, if it might be called one!  That tingling sense of a pervading spirit which was his,—­and yet not his.  He was the incandescent medium, and yet, paradoxically, gained in identity and individuality and was inseparable from the thing itself.

She could not see him.  A pillar hid the chancel from her view.

The service, to which she had objected as archaic, became subordinate, spiritualized, dominated by the personality.  Hodder had departed from the usual custom by giving out the page of the psalter:  and the verses, the throbbing responses which arose from every corner of the church, assumed a new significance, the vision of the ancient seer revived.  One verse he read resounded with prophecy.