rules for men and women ages ago. Some one of them might have
meant much to a girl in those dim days: to Rebecca pondering who
knows what temptation at the well; to Ruth tempted who knows how in
the corn and thinking of Boaz and the barn; to Judith plotting in
the camp; to Jephtha's daughter out on the wailing mountains.

But to-day, sitting in an Episcopal church in the closing years of
the nineteenth century, holding a copy of those old laws, and
thinking of Rowan as the breaker of the greatest of them, Isabel
for the first time awoke to realization of how close they are
still--those voices from the far land of Shinar; how all the men
and women around her in that church still waged their moral battles
over those few texts of righteousness; how the sad and sublime
wandering caravans of the whole race forever pitch their nightly
tents beneath that same mountain of command.

Thick and low sounded the response of the worshippers. She could
hear her grandmother's sonorous voice, a mingling of worldly
triumph and indifference; her aunt's plaintive and aggrieved. She
could hear Kate's needy and wounded. In imagination she could hear
his proud, noble mother's; his younger brother's. Against the
sound of his responses she closed all hearing; and there low on her
knees, in the ear of Heaven itself, she recorded against him her
unforgiveness and her dismissal forever.

An organ melody followed, thrillingly sweet; and borne outward on
it the beseeching of the All-Merciful:

"'Art thou weary, art thou languid,
Art thou sore distressed?