worshipper had reached the door. On his first Sunday, indeed, he
carried enthusiasm rather too far: in an innocent eagerness to
prolong the service as much as possible, and being too excited to
realize quite what he was doing, he went through the complete
list of supplications for all possible occasions. The
congregation were startled to find themselves praying
simultaneously both for rain and for fair weather.

In a cupboard in the vestry-room he had found an old surplice
hanging; he took it down, tried it on before the mirror, and
wistfully put it back. To this symbolic vestment his mind
returned as he sat solitary under the pine-trees, looking down
upon the valley of home. It was the season of goldenrod and aster
on the hillsides: a hot swooning silence lay upon the late
afternoon. The weight and closeness of the air had struck even
the insects dumb. Under the pines, generally so murmurous, there
was something almost gruesome in the blank stillness: a
suspension so absolute that the ears felt dull and sealed. He
tried, involuntarily, to listen more clearly, to know if this
uncanny hush were really so. There was a sense of being
imprisoned, but only most delicately, in a spell, which some
sudden cracking might disrupt.

The surplice tempted him strongly, for it suggested the sermon he
felt impelled to deliver, against the Bishop's orders. For the
beautiful chapel in the piny glade was, somehow, false: or, at
any rate, false for him. The architect had made it a dainty poem
in stone and polished wood, but somehow God had evaded the neat
little trap. Moreover, the God his well-bred congregation
worshipped, the old traditionally imagined snow-white St. Bernard