was one of those shyly anxious souls who have to be enticed into the
Kingdom of Heaven with wariness, and they made a great pretence of not
noticing him, going on with the exercises just as if he were not there,
a consideration which he was able richly to enhance when the plate came
round. After his first contribution Mrs. Sand regarded his spiritual
interests with almost superstitious reverence, according them the
fullest privacy of which she was capable. The gravity which the
gentleman attached to his situation was sufficiently testified by the
"amount"; Mrs. Sand never wanted better evidence than the amount. Even
Laura, acting doubtless under instructions, seemed disposed to hold away
from him in her prayers and exhortations; only a very occasional
allusion passed her lips which Duff could appropriate. These, when they
fell he gathered and set like flowers in his tenderest consciousness, to
visit and water them after the sun went down and for twenty-four hours
he would not see her again. Her intonation went with them and her face,
they lived on that. They stirred him, I mean, least of all in the manner
of their intention. After the first quarter of an hour it is to be
feared Lindsay suffered no more apprehensions on the score of emotional
hypnotism. He recognised his situation plainly enough, and there was no
appeal in it of which the Reverend Stephen Arnold for example could
properly suspect the genuineness or the permanence.

On this Saturday night he sat through the meeting as he had sat through
other meetings, absorbed in his exquisite experience, which he meditated
mostly with his eyes on the floor. His attitude was one quite adapted to
deceive Ensign Sand; if he had been occupied with the burden of his
transgressions it was one he might very well have fallen into. When
Laura knelt or sang he sometimes looked at her, at other times he looked
at the situation in the brightness of her presence at the other end of
the room. She gave forth there, for Lindsay, an illumination by which he