The minister had poured the wine from the flask into the chalice, and had broken the bread. He lifted the chalice and the light flashed from its bright surface.
"Drink ye all of it," he began gravely in his deep voice.
Then Katy heard no more. She put her arm tightly round the tall post of the bed and clung and clung to it as though a great creature or a great wave threatened to drag her from her feet. She looked far away across the wide bed, through the walls of the great house, over the village and the fields to the church on the hill. She was a child again in a red dress, and she had run unsteadily out the brick walk from her grandmother's kitchen door to the gate, out to the blessed, free, forbidden open road. She had talked to herself happily; she had stopped to pull leaves which still lingered on the Virginia creeper vines on the fences.
Presently, when she had trotted past the first field, the open door of the church had attracted her. She had been taken to church a few times; she remembered the singing—even that early had the strange performance of Henny Wenner fascinated her; she now turned her steps toward the delightful place. In the church an interesting man was at work with a little trowel and beautiful soft mortar, and she had watched him until she had grown sleepy, whereupon, with that feeling of possession in all the world which had been hers so keenly in her childhood, she had laid herself down on the soft cushion of a pew.
When she woke the interesting little man with his trowel was no longer in the church. Another man had taken his place before the hole in the church wall, and spying her suddenly had driven her out with anger. She had not thought of it for years; they had persuaded her that she had dreamed it; had told her that if John Hartman had ever spoken to her sharply, it was only to send her home where she belonged, that he could have against her no unkindly feeling.
But now it came back, strangely illumined. John Hartman had driven her away angrily, and John Hartman had held in his hand a silver cup, the shape of the one which the preacher held to Cassie's pale lips, but larger, handsomer. Upon it the sun had flashed as the lamplight flashed now upon this smaller cup.
At first Katy only remembered vaguely that there had been trouble about the communion service, that it had disappeared, that dishonest Alvin's dishonest and crazy father had taken it. The thought of Alvin brought to her mind a new set of sensations, confusing her.
"He held it in his hand," whispered Katy to herself. "Then he pushed it into the hole, quickly. I saw him do it!"
She leaned her head against the tall bedpost, and did not hear the command of the doctor to bring water.
"Katy!" said he, again, a little more loudly.