Hazel and Starlight and Flutters had the Boniface pew to themselves, but Hazel allowed Starlight to precede them into it, while she detained Flutters in the vestibule for a little seasonable advice. She had intended to administer it slowly and forcibly by the way. Now she had to compress it all into one hurried little moment. In her excitement she seized hold of Flutters's brown wrist, as she whispered, hurriedly, “Flutters, this is a church, where people come to worship. You will have to sit very still and not speak, only get up and sit down when I do, because part of the time it's wrong to sit down. So, Flutters, watch me very closely. I will find you the place in the Prayer-Book, but you had better not say the things that are written there, even if you can read them, 'cause they're probably things you do not understand at all, and don't know anything about, so it would be best not to say you believed them. You can sing the hymns, though; there won't be any harm in that, only sing very softly, for fear you don't get the tune right. Now that is all, I believe,” putting her finger to her lip in a meditative way, and with an anxious frown on her face, as if fearing she had overlooked some important instruction. “Yes, that is all; now follow me in;” and Flutters following her, took his seat with a most decorous air, and without staring about with such gaping astonishment, as might, perhaps, be looked for in a boy of fourteen, who had never seen the interior of a church before, so that Hazel at once felt much relieved. Her first duty, of course, was to furnish him with the proper page in the Prayer-Book, and her second to anticipate all irregularities in the order of service, by taking the book from his hands in ample time to supply him with the right place at the right moment. Now it must be confessed that all this was accomplished by Hazel in rather an officious and patronizing manner, but, unfortunately for her, there came a time when she herself was at a loss.
She did not know which Sunday it was after Trinity. Flutters did, and seeing her confusion anticipated Dr. Marberry by whispering, “It's the eighteenth Sunday, I think.”
Hazel thrust Flutters's Prayer-Book back into his hand, giving him one look, and such a look! It was dreadful to think that a thorough-going little church-woman could ever look like that, much less while the service itself was actually in progress.
Flutters felt “queer.” He saw how much there was in that look of Hazel's, and wondered if he had been greatly to blame in the matter. Starlight, of course, witnessed the whole proceeding, and heard Flutters's whisper (as did every one else in the neighborhood), which betrayed his familiarity with the service, and Starlight himself wondered how he managed to be quite so well up on the subject.
But it was an awfully good joke on Hazel. When they had been discussing the matter, and he had said, “It would be awful fun to see how Flutters would act in church, provided he had never been there,” Hazel had, of course, been quite right in saying that “People did not go to church to have awful fun,” but he could not help thinking that he had had a little fun all the same, only at Hazel's expense, and not Flutters's.