My eye chanced to fall on Mary’s face just at that moment. It wore the usual Sunday-dreamy look.
“Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.”
She shivered.
Alice glanced quickly towards her; but the thrill had already passed. She had regained outward composure, and sat looking at the preacher, calm and unobtrusively attentive.
The cousin fidgeted in his seat and coughed softly in his hand.
Alice fixed her eyes upon him.
Perhaps he felt them, for a deeper glow suffused his hectic cheek.
The preacher, after a few introductory remarks on the state of things which led the apostle to use these words, began with a sort of apology for calling the attention of his flock to such a text. And again Alice fixed her eyes upon the cousin, and again he seemed to feel their glow.
I shall not attempt to reproduce the sermon. His sketch of the advance of skepticism in Europe, in England, and in the North, struck me as labored; showing clearly that he had been set upon the task. But I shall not criticise it. He was at home, certainly, when he pictured the life of a pious, Christian woman whose yoke-fellow was an atheist. It was a fearful picture (from the point of view of his hearers,—and he was preaching to them), of which every detail was harrowing. But I leave that picture to the imagination of my readers.
It is the last feather that breaks the camel’s back.