"He wouldn't go as fast as that if he wasn't a little uneasy, too," muttered the druggist, whose dearth of business gave him abundant leisure to see all that was going on, and to imagine much more.
Van Berg determined to overtake Ida before she reached the hotel, and his strides were as long and swift as mortal dread could make them.
In the meantime, while the artist was making the detour necessary to reach the drug-store without meeting Ida, she and her companions had started homeward. As they approached a church on the outskirts of the village, the bell in the steeple commenced tolling.
"What's that for?" asked a young man of the party of a plain, farmer-like appearing man, who was just about to enter.
"For prayer-meetin'," was the good-natured reply. "It wouldn't hurt you to come to it;" and the speaker passed into the lecture-room.
"I call this frivolous assemblage to order," cried the youth, turning around to his companions. "If any one of our number has ever attended a prayer-meeting, let him hold up his right hand. I use the masculine pronoun, because the man always embraces the woman—when he gets a chance."
No hands were held up.
"Heathen, every mother's son of us," cried the first speaker. "The daughters are angels, of course, and don't need to go to prayer-meetin', as he of the cowhide sandals just termed it. But for the novelty of the thing, and for the want of something better to do, I move that we all go to-night. If it should be borous, why, we can come out."
The proposition pleased the fancy of the party, and with gay words and laughter that scarcely ceased at the vestibule, they entered the place of prayer and lighted down among the sober-visaged, soberly-dressed worshippers like a flock of tropical birds.
Ida reluctantly followed them. At first she half decided to walk home alone, but feared to do so. She who had resolved on facing the "King of Terrors" shrank, with a woman's instinct, from a lonely walk in the starlight.