"I cannot tell you, sir. He was a mere messenger. I paid no attention to him."
"Very well," said the church officer, turning away discontentedly. "It must be all right. I have implicit confidence in the man whose chosen substitute this is."
With this he ceased to try to intrude himself upon the stranger, but went down to his pew, and sat beside his wife in uneasy silence.
The chimes sang and sank, and sang again:
Holy, holy, holy—
The air was so clear that the sound rang twice the usual distance through the snowlit, sunlit air; and the sick and the old at home listened to the bells with a sudden stirring at their feeble hearts, and wished again that they could have gone to church. One bed-ridden woman, whose telephone connected her with Saint Agatha's, held the receiver to her sensitive ear, and smiled with the quick gratitude for trifling pleasures of the long sick, as she recognized the notes of the chime. With a leap and a thrill as if they cast their metal souls out in the act, the voices of the bells rose and swelled, and ceased and slept, and where they paused the anthem took the word up:
Holy, holy—
and carried it softly, just above the breath, with the tone which is neither a sigh, nor a cry, nor a whisper, but that harmony of all which makes of music prayer.
He must have entered on the wave of this strain; opinions differed afterwards as to this: some said one thing, some another; but it was found that most of the audience had not observed the entrance of the preacher at all. The choir ceased, and he was; and no more could be said. The church was well filled, though not over-crowded, and the decorous rustle of a fashionable audience in the interval preceding worship stirred through the house.
In the natural inattention of the moment, it was not remarkable that most of the people failed to notice the strange preacher until he was among them.