organ burst into the strains of the Doxology and the crowd rose. He stood with folded hands looking over the sea of faces, and his heart began to ache with an agony of suspense and fear of failure.
The singing ceased, and every head bent as he lifted his big hand, with its blue veins standing out like a net of steel wires, and pronounced a brief invocation.
When he read the hymn, the people felt in his voice the shock of a storm of pent-up emotion. He read it slowly, beautifully, and with exquisite tenderness.
While they sang he sat with his elbow on the little table on which stood a vase of roses, his face resting thoughtfully on his left hand, studying the people, his soul on fire with the sense of their infinite needs.
Crouching low in his seat under the left gallery, he saw a man who had confessed a great wrong and was searching for peace.
At a post on the right, in a seat where he had been accustomed to see a working-girl for the past two years, a stranger sat. The girl was found dead in her room the week before. She had lost her place because she wore shabby clothes, and she wore shabby clothes because she had been sending her earnings to her home in Connecticut, supporting an aged father, mother and a worthless brother.
The rich, the poor, the old, the young, the outcast, the publican and sinner, the strange woman and the
