"That will do nicely if you really don't want to go, mamma. We'll invite them all as we come out of church, and save the bother of writing notes. It's easier to explain when you see people than to write down everything."
"Yes, that's one of the conveniences of going to church," remarked Mrs. Joy, calmly. "I've often had as many as three or four invitations, coming out of Trinity on a Sunday morning in the season. These muffins are horrid. James, tell the cook she ought to be ashamed of herself to send up such things. They're as tough as leather, and burned besides—as black as my shoe, I do declare."
And James departed to incense the cook with the unsoftened message. The cook declared that when ladies came down an hour late for breakfast, they must expect tough muffins; and for her part she didn't care whether they were good or not; she didn't think much of the place anyway, and didn't mean to stay on. There'd be plenty of people coming in a week or two, and plenty of places to pick and choose from. Mrs. Joy was always having little difficulties with her servants.
Trinity Church looked cool and shady, as the party entered it from the dazzle of the outer sunshine. Berenice Joy was perfectly well-trained in the outward forms of devotion. She called herself "High Church;" and nothing could be more graceful than the manner in which she glided up the aisle, bowed to the chancel, and sank on her knees, for what was supposed to be a short interval of silent prayer. But her eyes went straight to the Grays' pew the moment she rose, and from thence to the Halletts', and she whispered to Ethel, "They're all here. That's nice." Then she indulged in a long stare at Candace, who had come to church with her cousins, and who, in her new cream-and-brown foulard, with the daisy-trimmed hat, and a pair of the birthday gloves on her slender hands, looked quite differently from the ill-dressed little passenger of the "Eolus" the Monday before.
"Do look! That's the very girl we saw on the boat," went on Berenice, in the same low whisper. "Did you ever! Hasn't Mrs. Gray done her over nicely? I wonder where she got that hat?"
"I wonder what she has done with the old one?"
"Given it to the cook, or sold it to the rag-and-bottle man," retorted Berry. Then came a suppressed giggle, which ended in sudden, forced gravity as the opening words of the service fell on their ears, and they rose with the rest of the congregation.
Candace was not conscious that she was being looked at. She had only once or twice in her life been in an Episcopal church, and never before in an old one. Trinity seemed to her as wonderful and picturesque as some of the churches she had read about in books. She looked at the square pews where people sat sideways, instead of fronting the chancel as in ordinary churches. She noted the tall wands with gilded tops, which marked the places of the junior and senior wardens; the quaint, swinging chandeliers of old brass; the tablets on the walls, two or three bearing inscriptions in honor of dead rectors or other departed worthies, one to the memory of a young girl, with a beautiful flying figure in bas-relief, carved in white marble. She gazed with amazement at the pulpit,—one of the ancient "three-decker" pattern, which is rarely seen now-a-days, with a clerk's desk below, a reading-desk above, above that a lofty pulpit for the clergyman, to which a narrow flight of stairs gave access, and suspended over all an enormous extinguisher-shaped sounding-board. It looked large and heavy enough to crush any clergyman who should be caught by its fall while in act of preaching; and Candace watched its slight oscillations with an apprehensive fascination, till she recollected that it must have hung there for a hundred years at least, so there was no reason to suppose that it would drop on this particular Sunday.
By turning her head a very little she could get a glimpse of the organ-loft, with its quaint little organ bearing two gilded mitres and a royal crown on top, and below, the inscription, "The Gift of George Berkeley, late Lord Bishop of Cloyne." She wondered who George Berkeley could have been, and resolved to ask Cousin Kate as they went home if there was any story about him.