As she walked down the village street, she met all the people going to church, and being a stranger she was naturally thoroughly inspected and criticised. She soon noticed this, and fear having been driven away, up came her old vanity again, and she ogled the men unmercifully.
An idea struck her, she too would go to church. It was the proper thing to do in the country—besides, it might afford her an opportunity of captivating some young squire or other local grandee.
"What a lark!" she said to herself. "Fancy my going to church."
She entered the church, and was placed by an old gentleman, who acted as pew-opener, in an empty pew which was in a very prominent position.
Once there, all her pluck and gladness seemed to run out of her finger ends again quite suddenly.
Her old landlady was right. The letter had only produced a temporary relief, a reaction all the more quickly fleeting, that it was so intense. The Furies had not left her yet.
It was a strange sensation that came over her. The silence of the church before the service commenced, the number of quiet faces—faces that had assumed that look of solemn misery which the rustic considers proper to the sacredness of the day and place—seemed to mesmerize her. A sense of vague terror crept over her, her nerves were strung to breaking. It was as if some explosion, something horrible, was about to happen at any moment.
The wretched woman was on a rack of mental agony and suspense. She could not move and leave the church; she was held there by the mesmeric gaze of all those quiet faces, which she believed was concentrated on herself.
Everything that occurred through that awful hour was as a separate stab. And all was so deliberate too, so cruelly deliberate.
The old clergyman mounted slowly into his pulpit, and putting on his spectacles deliberately, looked at her for a moment or two. It was horrible!