flag outside. The emblem of freedom, of course,--but----He hardly knew
why he did it. There were flags on every Methodist chapel, almost: the
sect had thrown itself into the war _con amore_. But Gaunt had fallen
into that sect by mistake; his animal nature was too weak for it: as for
his feeling about the church, he had just that faint shade of Pantheism
innate in him that would have made a good Episcopalian. The planks of
the floor were more to him than other planks; something else than
sunshine had often shone in to him through the little panes,--he touched
them gently; he walked softly over the rag-carpet on the aisle. The LORD
was in His holy temple. With another thought close behind that, of the
time when the church was built, more than a year ago; what a happy,
almost jolly time they had, the members giving the timber, and making a
sort of frolic of putting it up, in the afternoons after harvest. They
were all in one army or the other now: some of them in Blue's Gap. He
would help ferret them out in the morning. He shivered, with the old
doubt tugging fiercely at his heart. Was he right? The war was one of
God's great judgments, but was it _his_ place to be in it? It was too
late to question now.

He went up into the pulpit, taking out the Bible that lay on the shelf,
lighting a candle, glancing uneasily at the old man on the steps. He
never had feared to meet his eye before. He turned to the fly-leaf,
holding it to the candle. What odd fancy made him want to read the
uncouth, blotted words written there? He knew them well enough. "To my
Dear frend, David Gaunt. May, 1860. the Lord be Betwien mee And thee. J.
Scofield." It was two years since he had given it to Gaunt, just after
George had been so ill with cholera, and David had nursed him through
with it. Gaunt fancied that nursing had made the hearts of both son and
father more tender than all his sermons. He used to pray with them in
the evenings as George grew better, hardly able to keep from weeping