Flossy had been to prayer-meeting several times before with a cousin who visited them, but none of the others had attended such a meeting since they could remember. To Eurie and Ruth it was a real surprise to see the rows of empty seats. As for Marion she had overheard sarcastic remarks enough in the watchful and critical world in which she had moved to have a shrewd suspicion that such was the case.
"I don't know where to sit," whispered Flossy, shrinking from the gaze of several heads that were turned to see who the new comers were. "Don't you suppose they will seat us?"
"Not they," said Eurie, "Don't you remember Sunday? We must just put the courageous face on and march forward. I'm going directly to the front. I always said if ever I went to prayer-meeting at all, I shouldn't act as though I was ashamed that I came." Saying which she led the way to the second seat from the desk, directly in line with Dr. Dennis' eye.
That gentleman looked down at them with troubled face. Marion looked to see it light up, for she said in her heart:
"Gracie has surely told him my secret."
She knew little about the ways in the busy minister's household. The delightful communion of feeling that she had imagined between father and daughter was almost unknown to them. Very fond and proud of his daughter was Dr. Dennis; very careful of her health and her associations; very grateful that she was a Christian, and so, safe.
But so busy and harassed was his life, so endless were the calls on his time and his patience and his sympathy, that almost without his being aware of it, his own family were the only members of his church who never received any pastoral calls.
Consequently a reserve like unto that in too many households had grown up between himself and his child, utterly unsuspected by the father, never but half owned by the daughter. He thought of her religious life with joy and thanksgiving; when she went astray, was careful and tender in his admonition; yet of the inner workings of her life, of her reaching after higher and better living, of her growth in grace, or her days of disappointment and failure and decline he knew no more than the veriest stranger with whom she never spoke.
For while Grace Dennis loved and reverenced her father more than she did any other earthly being, she acknowledged to herself that she could not have told him even of the little conversation between her teacher and herself. She could, and did, tell him all about the lesson in algebra, but not a word about the lesson in Christian love.
So on this evening his face expressed no satisfaction in the presence of the strangers. He was simply disturbed that they had formed a league to meet here with mischief ahead, as he verily believed.