the hymns of God’s church had not been strange to her.  She caught the words at last, brokenly.  They were of some one who was wounded.  Wounded! she held her breath, listening curiously.  The wind shrieking past drowned the rest; only the swelling of the organ murmured above it.  She stole up the granite steps just within the entrance.  No one was there to see her, and she went on tiptoe to the muffled door, putting her ear to it, her hair falling over her face.  It was some plaintive minor air they were hymning, as sad as a dying wail, and as sweet as a mother’s lullaby.

“But He was wounded; He was wounded for our transgression; He was bruised for our iniquities.”

Then, growing slower and more faint, a single voice took up the strain, mournfully but clearly, with a hush in it as if one sang on Calvary.

“Yet we hid, as it were, our faces from Him.  He was despised, and we esteemed him not.”

Well; He only knows what it spoke to the woman, who listened with her guilty face hidden in her hair; how it drew her like a call to join the throng that worshipped him.

“I’d like to hear the rest,” she muttered to herself.  “I wonder what it is about.”

A child came down from the gallery just then, a ragged boy, who, like herself, had wandered in from the street.

“Hilloa, Meg!” he said, laughing, “you going to meeting?  That’s a good joke!” If she had heard him, she would have turned away.  But her hand was on the latch; the door had swung upon its noiseless hinges; the pealing organ drowned his voice.  She went in and sat down in an empty slip close by the door, looking about her for the moment in a sort of childish wonder.  The church was a blaze of light and color.  One perceived a mist of gayly dressed people, a soft flutter of fans, and faint, sweet perfumes below; the velvet-cushioned pulpit, and pale, scholarly outlines of the preacher’s face above; the warmth of rainbow-tinted glass; the wreathed and massive carving of oaken cornice; the glitter of gas-light from a thousand prisms, and the silence of the dome beyond.

The brightness struck sharply against the woman sitting there alone.  Her face seemed to grow grayer and harder in it.  The very hush of that princely sanctuary seemed broken by her polluted presence.  True, she kept afar off; she did not so much as lift up her eyes to heaven; she had but stolen in to hear the chanted words that were meant for the acceptance and the comfort of the pure, bright worshippers,—­sinners, to be sure, in their way; but then, Christ died for them.  This tabernacle, to which they had brought their purple and gold and scarlet, for his praise, was not meant for such as Meg, you know.

But she had come into it, nevertheless.  If He had called her there, she did not know it.  She only sat and listened to the chanting, forgetting what she was; forgetting to wonder if there were one of all that reverent throng who would be willing to sit and worship beside her.