“We shall have to get a three-seated family coach if these young women grow any larger,” said Mr. Cortlandt as the footman shut the door, and the horses began to move at an unwillingly decorous pace down the avenue. It was a bright and beautiful avenue, alive with churchgoers, driving and afoot, and with gay turnouts on their way to the park, on pleasure bent. “You have not seen the park yet, Beth, nor the museums, nor Riverside Drive--you haven’t begun to have a good time yet,” cried Natalie, remembering how much there would be to show Beth. “I should think I had begun to have a good time!” said Beth. “I began the moment I started for here with Anna Mary.” It was not far to the church, not much over half a mile; Beth wondered why they had not walked to it. It was a great stone building; into its threefold entrance on the avenue a stream of beautifully dressed people was flowing. Beth fell back with Natalie to enter in the wake of her aunt and uncle and Alys and Dirk. A shadowed beauty awed the child as she passed in. Soft light from the rose window over the door and from the long stained glass windows all along the body of the church seemed to Beth to be part of the soft harmonies with which the great organ bore them down the long avenue of the dim aisle. Dirk contrived to be first in the pew, at the head of which Mr. Cortlandt halted to admit his family. Beth came next, then Alys, Natalie, with Mrs. Cortlandt next to her husband at the end. Instead of the pulpit at which Beth was accustomed to look up, with its table below it and its high backed chairs flanking it, here was a beautiful altar, flower burdened, backed by a window through which the light fell as if heaven were but dimly veiled. There were noble carved stalls in row upon row within the inclosure of a rail before the altar, their dark wood contrasting perfectly with the gold and bronze-touched wall of strong, rich coloring. Was this indeed a church? the little visitor wondered. It was no more like the Centre Church to which she had trudged beside Aunt Rebecca all her short life than Uncle Jim’s palace of a house was like Aunt Rebecca’s brown clapboarded house. Beth did not dare think of fairies as at work on a church; it must be that their work was supplemented by angels here, but it was all one in its dream-like beauty with the fairy-land in which she was dwelling this wonder-winter. They were in good time for Beth to see all this before the service, but hardly had she taken it in than she heard the sound of singing, faint, yet clear and sweet, like a thread of sound dropped down from heaven to earth. It scarcely surprised Beth that she should hear the angels singing, since the miraculous was now her daily experience, but she held her breath to lose nothing of their strains, and the tears sprang to her eyes for the joy of it.