the girls, dingy, undecipherable. They made a shadow for the rest, lying
along the benches, shifting unnoticeably.

Three people, two of them women, sat in the open space at the end of
the room where the smoky fog from outside thickened and hung visibly in
mid-air, and there was the empty seat of the man who was talking. Laura
Filbert was one of the women. She might have been flung upon her chair;
her head drooped over the back, buried in the curve of one arm. A
tambourine hung loosely from the hand nearest her face; the other lay,
palm outward in its abandonment, among the folds that covered her limbs.
The folds hung from her waist, and she wore above them a short close
bodice like a Bengali woman. Her head covering had slipped, and
clung only to the knot of hair at the nape of her neck; she lacked,
pathetically, the conscious hand to draw it forward. She was unaware
even of the gaze of the Duke's Own, though it had fixity and absorption.

The man with folded hands went on talking. He seemed to have caught as a
text the refrain of the hymn that had been sung. "Yes, indeed," he said.
"I can tell heveryone 'ere this night, heveryone, that the Saviour is
mighty to keep. I 'ave got it out of my own personal experience, I 'ave.
Jesus don't only look after you on a Sunday, but six days a week, my
friends, six days a week. Fix your eye on Him and He'll keep His eye on
you--that's all your part of it. I don't mean to say I don't stumble an'
fall into sin. There's times when the Devil will get the upper 'and, but
oh, my friends, I ask you, each an' hevery one of you, is that the fault
of Jesus? No, it is not 'Is fault, it is the fault of the person. The
person 'as been forgetting Jesus, forgetting 'is Bible an' 'is prayers;
what can you expect? And now I ask you, my friends, is Jesus a-keeping
you? And if He is not, oh, my friends, ain't it foolish to put off
any longer? 'Ere we are met together to-night; we may never all meet