and fanned her hot face.  Every other moment now the door burst open, and admitted someone from the dark blue outside—­a group of clumsy youths who flung themselves upon the pew doors as if they had formed the deliberate purpose of keeping them out, some girls in their finery nodding to acquaintances as they entered, some labourers in unaccustomed clothes, and last Mary Colton who walked with her calculating step to the nearest choir bench.  Then a larger group hesitated at the door and the evangelist entered, mounting the pulpit with a confident tread, the minister taking a seat in the choir benches and the stewards sitting behind him.  There was some whispering between the evangelist and the minister, then the evangelist remained seated and the minister rose and gave out a hymn—­

“Rescue the perishing, care for the dying.”

Those who did not know the words knew and shouted the chorus.  It was a rousing beginning.  As the hymn came to a final shout, Anne Hilton in a black bonnet and old-fashioned mantle with a bead fringe at the shoulders, with one black cotton glove half on and the other wholly off, entered the chapel and sat just within the door.

The evangelist glanced round his congregation and found himself able to believe the report that the country districts were apathetic.  He was an ugly little man with straggling brown whiskers and unruly hair, and had no great appearance of illumination, yet he was a true evangelist, labouring hard to pull souls from the pit of social and moral corruption.  That was why he had been sent to the task of addressing the country congregations.  He was not working with an eye to romance, nor for the glory which comes to those who work in the slums.  He thought with the thoughts of those among whom he worked.  He had known what it was to be hungry.  He had known the crucifixion of standing idle when every limb ached to be working.  He knew that pregnant women are sometimes beaten and kicked by the clogs of their husbands.  He knew what little children felt like when they cried from cold.  His heart was incessantly burning, but he had worked now for fifteen years and it was no longer burning with indignation.  He had found others, not Christians, as he thought, who would be indignant, who would plan with pity and sympathy and with more efficiency and foresight that he could ever control, build up and organise ways of escape for much that he saw.  He could meet them too.  But his work was to understand, and from his understanding to attract and heal.  The others had nothing to say to a woman whose husband died, or whose son became crippled at work, to a man who lost his right hand, or a girl whose sweetheart was drowned two days before the wedding, and these things were always happening.