'Mamma, I don't know what you are talking about.'
'Of course not. It's no subject for a young girl to know anything about; but you must not think in your ignorance to set yourself above the advice and opinion of your mother, who knows all about it.'
Sophia said no more. To speak was but to stir the fire of her mother's wrath. She held her peace, and left the flame to burn itself out, or smother in its own smoke and ashes. She simply did not attend, and when her mother, stopping for breath, turned to survey, as it were, the field of battle, or at least to view the result of her onslaught as depicted in the girl's face, she was smiling to a bare-footed urchin who trotted by her side, Stephen Boague's youngest, who had taken a fancy to the gay apparel of Mrs. Sangster, and still kept it in view.
'Let that de'il's buckie alone, Sophia Sangster, and attend to me! It has been pulling the fringes of my shawl for the past two hours, and made it smell of peat-reek and moss-water so that I shall never be able to put it on again.'
The meeting was held in the field adjoining the excavation made for the church's foundation. Mr. Sangster was in the chair and supported on either hand by a minister, and there were chairs in front for Mrs. Sangster, her daughter, and Miss Brown, to which the matron, somewhat mollified by this observance, was ushered, when she very quickly appropriated the remaining seat for her shawl, so that there might be no vacant place for any one else. She might have spared herself the trouble. Mary was not in the crowd, and if she had been, would not have desired to sit beside her.
At the close of the religious exercises, Mary had hastened home to her brother, from whom she had already been longer away than at any previous time since he was taken ill. She would not have attended the meeting at all, but for his desire that she should; and she was glad to return home at the earliest moment, for since she had learned its proneness to think evil without cause, she loathed Glen Effick utterly and all its affairs. Her brother had been drowsing, but he woke up at her entrance, and asked to hear what had been done.
'Just the usual thing. Mr. Geddes preached about the Tabernacle, and Mr. Dowlas about Solomon's Temple.'
'Ah! I can imagine it; very pretty and flowery, no doubt. But I think when so many were collected they might have had something more useful and more likely to do good to the poor people. "A dish of metaphor," as my good father used to say, "is light feeding for hungry souls."'
'They did not think so, I assure you; they seemed quite delighted; though I confess I rather wearied over the inventory of the golden vessels, and I saw Sophia Sangster yawn once at any rate.'
'Was Sophia there?'