III

“There go pretty near every one of the Fernalds, down to the station. Land, but there’s a lot of ’em, counting the children. I suppose they’re

going to meet Guy’s wife’s brother, that they’ve got up here to lead these Christmas doings to-night. Queer idea, it strikes me.”

Miss Jane Pollock, ensconced behind the thick “lace curtains” of her “best parlour,” addressed her sister, who lay on the couch in the sitting-room behind, an invalid who could seldom get out, but to whom Miss Jane was accustomed faithfully to report every particle of current news.

“I suppose they think,” Miss Jane went on, with asperity, “they’re going to fix up the fuss in that church, with their greens and their city minister preaching brotherly love. I can tell him he’ll have to preach a pretty powerful sermon to reach old George Tomlinson and Asa Fraser, and make ’em notice each other as they pass by. And when I see Maria Hill coming toward me with a smile on her face and her hand out I’ll know something’s happened.”

“I don’t suppose,” said the invalid sister rather timidly, from her couch, “you would feel, Sister, as if you could put out your hand to her first?”

“No, I don’t,” retorted Miss Jane, very positively. “And I don’t see how you can think it, Deborah. You know perfectly well it was Maria Hill that started the whole thing—and then talked about me as if I was the one. How that woman did talk—and talks yet! Don’t get me thinking about it. It’s Christmas Day, and I want to keep my mind off such disgraceful things as church quarrels—if the Fernald family’ll let me. A pretty bold thing to do, I call it—open up that church on their own responsibility, and expect folks to come, and forget the past. —Debby, I wish you could see Oliver’s wife, in those furs of hers. She holds her head as high as ever—but she’s the only one of ’em that does it disagreeably—I’ll say that for

’em, if they are all city folks now. And of course she isn’t a Fernald. —Here comes Nancy and her husband. That girl don’t look a minute older’n when she was married, five years ago. My, but she’s got a lot of style! I must say her skirts don’t hang like any North Estabrook dressmaker can make ’em. They’re walking—hurrying up to catch the rest. Sam Burnett’s a good-looking man, but he’s getting a little stout.”

“Jane,” said the invalid sister, wistfully, “I wish I could go to-night.”

“Well, I wish you could. That is—if I go. I haven’t just made up my mind. I wonder if folks’ll sit in their old pews. You know the Hills’ is just in front of ours. But as to your going, Deborah, of course that’s out of the question. I suppose I shall go. I shouldn’t like to offend the Fernalds, and they do say Guy’s wife’s brother is worth hearing. There’s to be music, too.”

“I wish I could go,” sighed poor Deborah, under her breath. “To be able to go—and to wonder whether you will! —O Lord—” she closed her patient eyes and whispered it— “make them all choose to go—to Thy house—this Christmas Day. And to thank Thee that the doors are open—and that they have strength to go. And help me to bear it—to stay home!”

IV

“The problem is—” said the Reverend William Sewall, standing at the back of the church with his sister Margaret, and Guy Fernald, her husband, and Nan and Sam Burnett—the four who had, as yet, no children, and so could best take time, on Christmas afternoon, to make the final arrangements for the evening— “the problem is—to do the right thing, to-night. It would

be so mighty easy to do the wrong one. Am I the only man to stand in that pulpit—and is it all up to me?”

He regarded the pulpit as he spoke, richly hung with Christmas greens and seeming eagerly to invite an occupant.

“I should say,” observed his brother-in-law, Guy, his face full of affection and esteem for the very admirable figure of a young man who stood before him, “that a fellow who’s just pulled off the sort of service we know you had at St. John’s this morning, wouldn’t consider this one much of a stunt.”

Sewall smiled. “Somehow this strikes me as the bigger one,” said he. “The wisest of my old professors used to say that the further you got into the country the less it mattered about your clothes but the more about your sermon. I’ve been wondering, all the way up, if I knew enough to preach that sermon. Isn’t there any minister in town, not even a visiting one?”

“Not a one. You can’t get out of it, Billy Sewall, if you have got an attack of stage-fright—which we don’t believe.”

“There is one minister,” Nan admitted. “But I’d forgotten all about him, till Father mentioned him last night. But he doesn’t really count at all. He’s old—very old—and infirm.”

“Superannuated, they call it,” added Sam Burnett. “Poor old chap. I’ve seen him—I met him at the post-office this morning. He has a peaceful face. He’s a good man. He must have been a strong one—in his time.”

“Had he anything to do with the church trouble?” Sewall demanded, his keen brown eyes eager.

Nan and Guy laughed.

“Old ‘Elder Blake’?—not except as he was on his knees, alone at home, praying for the fighters—both sides,” was Guy’s explanation. “So Father