Throughout the sermon she had not taken her eyes off the old man in the pulpit, and so interested was she, and so earnestly did she drink in all he said, that any one noticing could tell that, to her, the plain old man in the pulpit was more than a pastor.
She sat off by herself. Not one of them in all Cottontown would come near her.
“Our virtue is all we po' fo'ks has got—if we lose that we ain't got nothin' lef',” Mrs. Banks of grass-widow fame had once said, and saying it had expressed Cottontown's opinion.
Mrs. Banks was very severe when the question of woman's purity was up. She was the fastest woman at the loom in all Cottontown. She was quick, with a bright, deep-seeing eye. She had been pretty—but now at forty-five she was angular and coarse-looking, with a sharp tongue.
The Bishop had smiled when he heard her say it, and then he looked at Margaret Adams sitting in the corner with her boy. In saying it, Mrs. Banks had elevated her nose as she looked in the direction where sat the Magdalene.
The old man smiled, because he of all others knew the past history of Mrs. Banks, the mistress of the loom.
He replied quietly: “Well, I dun'no—the best thing that can be said of any of us in general is, that up to date, it ain't recorded that the Almighty has appinted any one of us, on account of our supreme purity, to act as chief stoner of the Universe. Mighty few of us, even, has any license to throw pebbles.”
Of all his congregation there was no more devoted member than Margaret Adams—“an' as far as I kno',” the old man had often said, “if there is an angel on earth, it is that same little woman.”
When she came into church that day, the old man noticed that even the little Hillites drew away from her. Often they would point at the little boy by her side and make faces at him. To-day they had carried it too far when one of them, just out in the church yard, pushed him rudely as he walked proudly by the side of his mother, looking straight before him, in his military way, and not so much as giving them a glance.
“Wood's-colt,” sneered the boy in his ear, as he pushed him.