beyond our reach and will.

It was between ten and eleven o'clock of the next day--Sunday.
David's cold had become worse. He had turned over necessary work to
the negro man and stayed quietly in his room since the silent
breakfast Two or three books chosen carelessly out of the trunk lay
on his table before the fire: interest had gone out of them this
day. With his face red and swollen, he was sitting beside this
table with one hand loosely covering the forgotten books, his eyes
turned to the window, but looking upon distant inward scenes.

Sunday morning between ten and eleven o'clock! the church-going
hour of his Bible-student life. In imagination he could hear across
these wide leagues of winter land the faint, faint peals of the
church bells which were now ringing. He was back in the town again--
up at the college--in his room at the dormitory; and it was in the
days before the times of his trouble. The students were getting
ready for church, with freshly shaved faces, boots well blacked,
best suits on, not always good ones. He could hear their talk in
the rooms around his, hear fragments of hymns, the opening and
shutting of doors along the hallways, and the running of feet down
the stairs. By ones and twos and larger groups they passed down and
out with their hymnals, Testaments, sometimes blank books for notes
on the sermon. Several thrust bright, cordial faces in at the door,
as they passed, to see whether he and his roommate had started.

The scene changed. He was in the church, which was crowded from
pulpit to walls. He was sitting under the chandelier in the choir,
the number of the first hymn had just been whispered along, and he
began to sing, with hundreds of others, the music which then