“Well, I wish you could. That is—if I go. I haven’t just made up my mind. I wonder if folks’ll sit in their old pews. You know the Hills’ is just in front of ours. But as to your going, Deborah, of course that’s out of the question. I suppose I shall go. I shouldn’t like to offend the Fernalds, and they do say Guy’s wife’s brother is worth hearing. There’s to be music, too.”
“I wish I could go,” sighed poor Deborah, under her breath. “To be able to go—and to wonder whether you will! —O Lord—” she closed her patient eyes and whispered it— “make them all choose to go—to Thy house—this Christmas Day. And to thank Thee that the doors are open—and that they have strength to go. And help me to bear it—to stay home!”
IV
“The problem is—” said the Reverend William Sewall, standing at the back of the church with his sister Margaret, and Guy Fernald, her husband, and Nan and Sam Burnett—the four who had, as yet, no children, and so could best take time, on Christmas afternoon, to make the final arrangements for the evening— “the problem is—to do the right thing, to-night. It would
be so mighty easy to do the wrong one. Am I the only man to stand in that pulpit—and is it all up to me?”
He regarded the pulpit as he spoke, richly hung with Christmas greens and seeming eagerly to invite an occupant.
“I should say,” observed his brother-in-law, Guy, his face full of affection and esteem for the very admirable figure of a young man who stood before him, “that a fellow who’s just pulled off the sort of service we know you had at St. John’s this morning, wouldn’t consider this one much of a stunt.”
Sewall smiled. “Somehow this strikes me as the bigger one,” said he. “The wisest of my old professors used to say that the further you got into the country the less it mattered about your clothes but the more about your sermon. I’ve been wondering, all the way up, if I knew enough to preach that sermon. Isn’t there any minister in town, not even a visiting one?”