At the corner Uncle Charlie and Emmy Lou met Tom coming back towards Sadie's with the barouche from the livery stable. One felt Tom saw them, though he looked the other way.
At the second corner they met Sally Carter. Her curls shone like Aunt Cordelia's copper hot-water jug, and her skirts stood out and flaunted. She stopped when Emmy Lou stopped, but with reluctance, since it was palpable she was in a hurry.
"I've decided I didn't treat Sadie right. My name's still on her roll. Those little girls my mother didn't want me to associate with at the other Sunday schools were on your church steps, anyway, and she wouldn't want me to stay."
At the next corner they met Lisa and Yetta and Katie, scoured and braided and in their Sunday dresses. They didn't want to stop either, palpably being in even a greater hurry.
"As long as we're goin' to Sunday school we think well go back to the one we started from," said Lisa. "That sassy little girl our mothers said we shouldn't put up with was on your church steps anyhow, and was sassy to us some more."
At St. Simeon's itself they met Mamie. "I didn't want to wait, but I felt I ought to. I'm going back to Sadie's, and I'm late. Tom called to us here on the steps as he went by in the barouche, and said Sadie's little twin sisters were going to be baptized at her church right after Sunday school."
"Which," said Uncle Charlie the while his Emmy Lou swallowed tears, "hangs Willie Glidden neatly in his own innovations."
When Sadie and Hattie and Emmy Lou met at school the next day, Sadie's eyes were bright and her face shone. Why not? As she pointed out, her little sisters were justified to her, her erring scholars were returned, her grandfather said he'd see to it that they could afford to have Tom back and the barouche too, and it all went to prove the efficacy of prayer.
It would seem to. That is, of Sadie's prayer. Emmy Lou could see that. She indeed had sent up billets-doux in Sadie's behalf herself. But it did not explain everything.
"Mr. Glidden at my Sunday school prayed too, that the least of these be brought into the fold."