herself and looked out the lessons for the day. Alfred gazed at her face:
devoured it. But her eyes never roved. She seemed to have put off
feminine curiosity, and the world, at the church door. Indeed he wished
she was not quite so heavenly discreet; her lashes were delicious, but he
longed to see her eyes once more; to catch a glance from them, and, by
it, decipher his fate.

But no; she was there to worship, and did not discern her earthly lover,
whose longing looks were glued to her, and his body rose and sank with
the true worshippers, but with no more spirituality than a piston or a
Jack-in-the-box.

In the last hymn before the sermon, a well-meaning worshipper in the
gallery delivered a leading note, a high one, with great zeal, but small
precision, being about a semitone flat; at this outrage on her
too-sensitive ear, Julia Dodd turned her head swiftly to discover the
offender, and failed; but her two sapphire eyes met Alfred's point-blank.

She was crimson in a moment, and lowered them on her book again, as if to
look that way was to sin. It was but a flash: but sometimes a flash fires
a mine.

The lovely blush deepened and spread before it melted away, and Alfred's
late cooling heart warmed itself at that sweet glowing cheek. She never
looked his way again, not once: which was a sad disappointment; but she
blushed again and again before the service ended, only not so deeply. Now
there was nothing in the sermon to make her blush: I might add, there was
nothing to redden her cheek with religious excitement. There was a little
candid sourness--oil and vinegar-- against sects and Low Churchmen; but
thin generality predominated. Total: "Acetate of morphia," for dry souls