Roger Atwood had entered Mildred’s mind as a part of a grotesque dream, but he had no place in her waking thoughts.  With Vinton Arnold, however, it was very different, and scarcely an hour passed that she was not wondering where he was, and again questioning his prolonged silence.  Often her heart beat quick as she imagined she caught a glimpse of him in the street; and it must be admitted that she looked for him constantly, although she took pains never to pass his residence.  Could he be ill, or was he patiently waiting like herself, secure in her good faith?  She longed to see him, even though unseen herself, and one Sunday early in November she yielded to her strong desire to look upon one in reality who had become an abiding presence in her mind.  She believed that from a certain part of the gallery in the church they both had attended in former days she could look down upon the Arnold pew.  If he were not ill she felt quite sure he would be in his old place.

It was almost with a sense of guilty intrusion that she crossed the threshold of her old church-home and stole to the thinly occupied gallery.  She saw familiar faces, but shrank from recognition in almost trembling apprehension, scarcely feeling secure behind her thick veil.  The place, once so familiar, now seemed as strange as if it belonged to another world; and in a certain sense she felt that it was part of a world with which she would never willingly identify herself again.  It was a place where fashion was supreme, and not the spirit of Christ, not even the spirit of a broad, honest, and earnest humanity.  The florid architecture, the high-priced and elegantly upholstered pews, sparsely occupied by people who never wished to be crowded under any possible circumstances, and preferred not to touch each other except in a rather distant and conventional way, the elaborately ritualistic service, and the cold, superficial religious philosophy taught, were all as far removed from the divine Son of Mary as the tinsel scenery of a stage differs from a natural landscape.  Mildred’s deep and sorrowful experience made its unreality painfully apparent and unsatisfactory.  She resolved, however, to try to give the sacred words that would be uttered their true meaning; and, in fact, her sincere devotion was like a simple flower blooming by the edge of a glacier.  She felt that the human love she brought there and sought to gratify was pure and unselfish, and that in no sense could it be a desecration of the place and hour.  To a nature like hers, her half-pitying love for one so unfortunate as Vinton Arnold was almost as sacred as her faith, and therefore she had no scruple in watching for his appearance.