The faces of Temperance and Nathan were wrung with generous, impersonal pain, and they held each other’s hands fast clasped, fearing for Mabella, who, her face working with keen, mother anguish, looked at the stony face of her torturer as a lamb might regard the knife which slays it; Ann Serrup, dazed, half stupefied by the storm which beat upon her, had only sufficient intelligence left to shrink from the wounds which followed thick and fast, as a person freezing to death may yet feel the icy rain dashing in his face.
Lanty sat at the end of the pew, a terrible expression of self-reproach in his eyes, his head held erect, his shoulders squared as one who receives the righteous recompense of his sins. But quickening all this endurance into agony was the thought of Mabella, he knew so well what she was suffering.
And, lifted up trustingly, in the midst of these pain-drawn faces, like flowers looking up from amid stones, were the faces of the two children, Dorothy and little Reub.
Having finished their scrutiny of each other they had joined hands and sat silent, looking up wonderingly at the preacher.
Upon their faces there was still the courage and hardihood seen upon the faces of all infants; alas! it is not long before it fades away, abashed by the unconscious recognition of life’s terrors. To those who see it, this bravery, the bravery of supreme ignorance, is poignantly touching. And of all that congregation only these two children dared look the preacher confidently in the face.
And yet there was one other. Vashti Lansing, sitting in the extreme corner of the pew, and facing her husband, had never taken her eyes from his face, nor withdrawn her gaze from his.
Her face was white like his, drawn as if by the intensity of concentrated thought.
Seemingly unconscious of the troubled faces about her, yet seeing every variation in their agony, she listened to her own thoughts voiced by Sidney’s tongue, she heard her own bitterness translated into words of fatal eloquence.
By the force of her suggestion these ideas, these images, had been impressed upon the mind of her husband, and he read the symbols aloud to his terrified congregation mechanically, only swayed by the more or less emphatic manner in which the thoughts had been suggested to him. And sitting thus, Vashti Lansing saw her own soul face to face.