" Was it a dream?
When the last little Band of Hoper had left the vestry,
Mary Barner sat alone with her thoughts, looking with
unseeing eyes at the red and silver mottoes on the wall.
Pledge cards which the children had signed were gaily
strung together with ribbons across the wall behind her.
She was thinking of the little people who had just
gone--how would it be with them in the years to come?--they
were so sweet and pure and lovely now. Unconsciously she
bowed her head on her hands, and a cry quivered from her
heart. The yellow sunlight made a ripple of golden water
on the wall behind her and threw a wavering radiance on
her soft brown hair.
It was at that moment that the Rev. Hugh Grantley, the
new Presbyterian minister, opened the vestry door.
CHAPTER V
THE RELICT OF THE LATE MCGUIRE
Close beside the Watson estate with its strangely shaped
dwelling stood another small house, which was the earthly
abode of one Mrs. McGuire, also of Irish extraction, who
had been a widow for forty years. Mrs. McGuire was a
tall, raw-boned, angular woman with piercing black eyes,
and a firm forbidding jaw. One look at Mrs. McGuire
usually made a book agent forget the name of his book.
When she shut her mouth, no lips were visible; her upturned
nose seemed seriously to contemplate running up under
her sun bonnet to escape from this wicked world with all
its troubling, and especially from John Watson, his wife
and his family of nine.
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