Aunt Rody gave Judith a nudge. The nudge startled the absorbed reader into dropping, with a thud, the book she held in her hand upon the carpeted floor of the pew; with a crimsoned face Judith stooped and picked up the book; after a moment of deliberation and a defiant flash toward Aunt Rody, stiff and straight in the end of the pew, she re-opened her book and was again lost in the fascinating story. Aunt Rody glared at her, but she turned a page, only half conscious of the wrath that was being heaped up against her; this time it was not a nudge, but a large hand that startled her; the large hand, brown, strong, was laid across the page.
Judith gave a glance, not defiant, into the kindly, grave eyes, then shut the book, straightened herself and tried hard to listen to the minister.
The figure at the other end of the pew, the man’s figure, settled back comfortably to listen, and listened without trying hard.
The kindly, grave eyes under the shaggy black brows never stirred from the minister’s face; once in a while the brown, strong hand stroked the long white beard; Judith watched him as he listened, and then she watched Aunt Rody, unbending, alert, with her deep-set black eyes, her hard-working hands very still in her new, black kid gloves.
When the sermon was ended Judith gave a sigh of relief; she could sit still, she had sat still; but her mind had not followed the minister.
She wished she could like sermons. She liked the Bible. This sermon was not like the Bible.
As she stood in the church doorway, waiting for Aunt Rody, who always had something to tell, or something to ask in the crowd in the aisle, she overheard a loud whisper behind her: “Oh, that’s Judith Mackenzie. She has come to stay with the Sparrow girls. Her mother was their niece. Father died long ago; mother last winter.” To escape further details, the listener stepped forward and down one step; there was a stir and some one stood beside her, a tall young man, not like any one else in Bensalem: she knew without raising her eyes that he was the new minister. She flushed, thinking that he had noticed that she was reading her Sunday School book in church.
“Would you like to be a Christian?” he asked, with something in his tone that made it hard for her to keep the tears back.
This was worse than a rebuke for reading; she might have excused herself for that; for this she had no words. The voice was very low; perhaps no one heard beside herself.
Too startled to speak at first, she kept silent; then, too truthful to speak one word that she was not sure was true, and thinking that she hardly knew what it was to be a Christian, she could not say “Yes”; not daring to say “No,” she stood silent.