There was only one disappointment to mar the perfection. She felt quite aggrieved that Mr. Meredith—or Mr. St. John as she still called him in her thoughts—did not "come on" in the first act.
"Mebby he don't hev the leadin' part to-day," she thought disappointedly, as a callow youth, whose hair was pompadoured and whose chin receded, began to read the lessons for the day. Amarilly was kept in action by her effort to follow the lead of the man in front of her.
"It's hard to know jest when to set or stand or pray, but it keeps things from draggin'," she thought, "and thar's no chanct to git sleepy. It keeps me jest on the hump without no rayhearsal fer all this scene shiftin'."
Her little heart quickened in glad relief when the erect form of John
Meredith ascended the pulpit to deliver the sermon.
"That other one was jest the understudy," she concluded.
The sermon, strong, simple, and sweet like John himself, was delivered in a rich, modulated voice whose little underlying note of appeal found entrance to many a hard-shell heart. The theology was not too deep for the attentive little scrubber to comprehend, and she was filled with a longing to be good—very good. She made ardent resolutions not to "jaw" the boys so much, and to be more gentle with Iry and Go. Her conscience kept on prodding until she censured herself for not mopping the corners at the theatre more thoroughly.
At the conclusion of the sermon the rector with a slight tremor in his mellifluous voice pronounced the benediction. Amarilly's eyes shone with a light that Lord Algernon's most eloquent passages could never have inspired.
The organ again gave forth its rich tones, and a young, fair-haired boy with the face of a devotee arose and turned toward the congregation, his face uplifted to the oaken rafters. A flood of sunshine streamed through the painted window and fell in long slanting rays upon the spiritual face. The exquisite voice rose and fell in silvery cadence, the soft notes fluting out through the vast space and reaching straight to Amarilly's heart which was beating in unison to the music. "Oh," she thought wistfully, "if Pete Noyes was only like him!"
She responded to the offertory with a penny, which lay solitary and outlawed on the edge of a contribution plate filled with envelopes and bank bills. The isolated coin caught the eye of the young rector as he received the offerings, and his gaze wandered wonderingly over his fashionable congregation. It finally rested upon the small, eager-eyed face of his washerwoman's daughter, and a look of angelic sweetness came into his brown eyes with the thought: "Even the least of these!"
Colette, statuesque and sublime, caught the flash of radiance that illumined the face of her pastor, and her heart-strings responded with a little thrill.