After supper, David and his wife, leaving the children with orders to go to bed at the first flash from the Windmill, went to church.
They took the same back seat which they had the night that David shipped. There was much the same scene before them. There was bald-headed Deacon Luce, in his usual Damocles' seat exactly beneath the dangling chandelier, which children watched in morbid hope of a horror; there was the president of the Dorcas Society, a gray-haired woman who had navigated home a full-rigged ship from the Gold Coast; there were grave-faced men who, among them, could have charted half the globe. In the pulpit was the same old-fashioned, bookish man, who, having led his college class, had passed his life in this unknown parish, lost in delight, in his study, in the great Athenian's handling of the presumptuous Glaucon, or simply unfolding parables in his pulpit.
That former night came vividly back to Delia Prince. Through the opening hymn, in which she did not join; through the story of the feast in Simon's house, she was thinking of the time when David told her he had shipped, and she had made up her mind to save a home.
But in the second hymn she joined; and in her joy she forgot herself and sang,—as she had been used to sing when she was the leader of all the singing. In a moment they all knew that she was there.
“Thus far the Lord hath led me on;
Thus far His power prolongs my days;
And every evening shall make known
Some fresh memorial of His grace.”
II.
“M. Isaacs” was over the door; Mr. Isaacs was within. Without, three golden balls were hanging, like apples of the Hesperides; within was an array of goods which the three balls had brought in.
Mr. Isaacs was walking to and fro behind the counter, and briskly rubbing his hands.
“My good wife Sarah,” he said, with a strong Semitic accent, “those sudden, raw east winds! I am so frozen as if I was enjoying myself upon the skating-rink,—and here it is the summer. Where is that long spring overcoat that German man hypotecated with us last evening? Between the saddle and the gold-lace uniform, you say?”