Laura lifted her head at this and dropped with the other exhorters on her knees on the floor.  As she moved she bent upon the audience a preoccupied gaze, by which she seemed to observe numbers, chances, from a point remote and emotionally involved.  Lindsay’s impression was that she looked at him as from behind a glass door.  Then her eyes closed as the other woman began, and through their lids, as it were, he could see that she was again caught up, though her body remained abased, her hands interlocked between her knees, swaying in unison with the petition.  The Ensign was a little meagre freckled woman, whose wisps of colourless hair and tight drawn-down lips suggested that in the secular world she would have been bedraggled and a nagger.  She gained an elevation, it was plain, from the Bengali dress; it kept her away from the temptation of cheap plush and dirty cotton lace; and her business gave her a complacency which was doubtless accepted as sanctification by her fellow-officers, especially by her husband, who had announced her influence with the Divine Being, and who was himself of an inferior commission.  She prayed in a complaining way, and in a strained minor key that assumed a spiritual intimacy with all who listened, her key to hearts.  She told the Lord in confidence that however appearances might be against it every soul before him was really longing to be gathered within His almighty arms, and when she said this, Laura Filbert, on the floor, threw back her head and cried “Hallelujah!” and Duff started.  The mothers broke in upon the Ensign with like exclamations.  They had a recurrent, perfunctory sound, and passed unnoticed; but when Laura again cried “Praise the Lord!” Lindsay found himself holding in check a hasty impulse to leave the premises.  Then she rose, and he watched with the Duke’s Own to see what she would do next.  The others looked at her too, as she stood surprisingly fair and insistent among them, Ensign Sand with humble eyes and disapproving lips.  As she began to speak the silence widened for her words, the ship’s cook stopped shuffling his feet.  “Oh come,” she said, “Come and be saved!” Her voice seemed to travel from her without effort, and to penetrate every corner and every consciousness.  There was a sudden dip in it like the fall of water, that thrilled along the nerves.  “Who am I that ask you?  A poor weak woman, ignorant, unknown.  Never mind.  It is not my voice but the voice in your heart that entreats you ‘Come and be saved!’ You know that voice; it speaks in the watches of the night; it began to speak when you were a little, little child, with little joys and sorrows and little prayers that you have forgotten now.  Oh, it is a sweet voice, a tender voice”—­her own had dropped to the cooing of doves—­“it is hard to know why all the winds do not carry it, and all the leaves whisper it!  Strange, strange!  But the world is full of the clamour of its own foolishness, and the voice is lost in it, except in places where people come to pray, as here to-night, and in those night watches.  You hear it now in the echo from my lips, ‘Come and be saved.’  Why must I beg of you?  Why do you not come hastening, running?  Are you too wise?  But when did the wisdom of this world satisfy you about the next?  Are you too much occupied?  But in the day of judgment what will you do?”—­