In truth he had changed. He was finer, more complex; for it had been impossible to lead the old simple village life in the hotels and boarding-houses where he had lodged. He was different in every way, and in becoming different he had almost forgotten his past self. Even the mental emotion of his first association with Gwen in this work of salvation had passed; he took it now as a matter of course. For the rest, seeing his way clear, and urged thereto by those who had heard him speak, he had almost made up his mind to the ministry.
Yet not quite so; and the sight of Myfanwy Jones robed in black samite, mystic, wonderful, in the very first row, roused recollections, almost regrets.
For there had been no harm in their holiday junketing at Blackborough; they had only enjoyed themselves immensely.
A sense of something electrical in the air disturbed him from recollections of a man in a music hall, who had ventured to comment on his companion's beauty, and he became conscious that Gwen and Alicia Edwards were both looking at him. There was a whole world of difference in the meaning of these looks, but Mervyn lumped them together as a control to his wandering thoughts.
He need not have felt that sudden sense of guilt so far as poor Gwen was concerned. Her limited mind had long since relegated the stormy past to the Devil. She shuddered at the thought of it, as she shuddered at the thought of Him.
But Mervyn was a soul which, mysteriously, she had saved.
In a measure this was true. All unknown to herself, she was largely responsible for the outburst of spiritual energy around her. There was that in her which, given freely as she gave it, without measure and without stint, was bound to force response. And to-night, wearied utterly, yet elated, singing against the doctor's orders, racked by a terrible pain when she drew her breath, she was at the flood-tide of her potentiality; and she knew it.
Beside this--the joy and rapture of the stigmatic--Alicia Edwards' jealousy of Myfanwy was trivial indeed. But though much that was trivial lingered in the minds of many in the chapel, there was a deadly earnestness in most of the faces which looked up to the missioners, almost as they might have looked at a veritable transfiguration of their Lord.
The toilworn, the smug, the rugged, the sensuous, the clever, on all these lay a supreme desire, yet a supreme content. Briefly, they had what they wanted, yet they wanted something more. What?
An analysis of the minds of most would, no doubt, have yielded a large percentage of purely personal sense of salvation, but there was more than that in the whole atmosphere of the little chapel as Morris Pugh stood up to give his first address since his vigil upon the mountain. What it was, who can say? Call it the Spirit of God, call it anything you please, all explanations resolve themselves into a still further away, "What is it?"