"By George!" Will exclaimed. "That's just like Floss: I might have known."
"What shall we do?" asked his companion in dismay.
"Do? Make ourselves comfortable. Meeting won't be more than an hour, and we can endure that. It is a great deal pleasanter here than in church."
"Yes," she assented doubtfully.
"And, as we can't help ourselves, it is no use to fret."
They found a cosey nook, and a log for a seat, which Will, with a praiseworthy care for Ease's Sunday raiment, covered with a newspaper he chanced to have in his pocket. They fell to chatting of old times, the theatricals, Will's college-scrapes, and the thousand things which give to life its varied savors. Will in a quiet fashion had been fond of his companion from childhood, but had never thought it necessary to tell her so: indeed, he had never in any serious way considered the fact himself, but, being fond of her companionship, had sought and accepted it as a matter of course. This placid afternoon, with the water at their feet, the trees rustling in the faintest whispers overhead, and the air about them mellow and fragrant, a sensuous, "lotus-fed content" stole over them, and the moments went by unheeded. They were too much at ease for lovers, but they were the best of friends.
Meanwhile, Flossy Plant, filled with a wicked glee, drove onward to Samoset, found an old man to fasten her horse, and walked into church as demurely as the most saintly maiden of them all. The party had set out for the Unitarian church; but Flossy, having taken matters into her own hands, drove to quite another sanctuary. She had often heard her cousins laugh about the quaintness of a church of Scotch Presbyterians which had been established in the earlier days of Samoset, and which still retained much of its antique simplicity.
She had seen the building in driving with Will, and now the whim had seized her to attend the service. She was a little late, and an icy breath of stern theology seemed to meet her when she entered. She slipped into a seat near the door, and half held her breath, lest a precentor should start up from some unsuspected corner, and pounce upon her for disturbing the awful solemnity of the assembly.
The building was plain to ugliness,—a square box, high and bare, with stiff pews, whose uncushioned angles precluded the possibility of any sacred drowsiness. The windows were devoid of shutters, the floor was carpetless, the pulpit as guiltless of cushions as the pews. The congregation had a blue, pinched look, as if their religion were too difficult of digestion to be nourishing, and a moral dyspepsia had been the result of swallowing large portions of it.
The preacher, however, was a noble-looking man, with snowy hair and beard. He was reading and expounding the twenty-second Psalm when Flossy entered; and she could not but be struck with the force of his unaffected diction and the nobility of his thought, colored though it necessarily was by his narrow theology.