“You think it mean anything, Sue?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, almost inaudibly; “but it’s awful; an’ if it was to come close an’ we should all dead, where would we go to, Sam?”
As if in reply to her question, the old man amongst the deck passengers, who had called the comet “The Sword of the Lord,” again lifted up his voice, this time repeating some words from the Scriptures:
“Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither His ear heavy that He cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid His face from you, that He will not hear.”
Susan heard and trembled; a woman in the crowd of watchers groaned out, “Yes, Lord!”
“Have mercy!” sobbed another.
Some one began repeating the hymn, “Jesus, Lover of my Soul.”
“Christ, have mercy,” prayed the shivering people.
“Sue,” whispered Jones, “I heard on Friday night that the comet won’t touch the world until Wednesday; so when we get to Colon to-morrow morning we better married. This sort of life is not one to face death in. I am not a coward, Sue, but, after all, it will be better to die right.”
An immense weight seemed lifted off Susan’s heart as she heard these words. Her present mode of life was called “living in sin” by the ministers and religious folk of her country; and so persistently had this view of it been inculcated that, in common with thousands of others, she had come to regard unsanctified connexions as the one offence really worth considering. True, she had never gone further than giving her intellectual assent to this proposition; but then she had never seen a great comet blazing in the sky before. She now agreed with it with all her soul.