On Lord's Day more than on any other at the mountain Hazel was like a small derelict boat beached on a peaceful shore. There was a hypnotic quiet about the place, with no sound of Martha's scrubbing, no smell of cooking. There was always cold meat on Lord's Day, with pickled cabbage, that concomitant of mysterious Sabbath blessedness. A subdued excitement prevailed about service-time, and sank again afterwards like a wind in the tree-tops. Hazel felt very proud of Edward in chapel, and a little awed at his bearing and his abstracted air. She came near to loving him on the lilac-scented Sundays when he read those old fragrant love-stories that he had dreaded. His voice was pleasant and deep. '"And he took unto him his wife, and she bare him a son."' It may have been that the modulations of Edward's voice spoke as eloquently as words to her, or that Reddin had destroyed her childish detachment, but she began to bring these old tales into touch with her own life. She envied these glamorous women of the ancient world. They were so tall, so richly clad, dwelling under their golden-fruited trees beneath skies for ever blue. It was all so simple for them. There were no Reddins, no old ladies. Their stories went smoothly with unravelled thread, not like her knitting. She began to long to be one of that dark-eyed company, clear and changeless as polished ivory, moving with a slow and gliding stateliness across the rose-coloured dawn, bearing on their heads with effortless grace beautiful pitchers of water for a thirsty world. Edward had shown her just such a picture in his mother's illustrated Bible. Instinctively she fell back on the one link between herself and them. 'Ed'ard's took _me_ to wife,' she thought. The sweetest of vague new ideas stirred in her mind like leaf-buds within the bark of a spring tree. They brought a new expression to her face. Edward's eyes strayed continually to the bar of dusty sunlight where she sat, her down-bent face as mysterious as all vitality is when seen in a new aspect. The demure look she wore in chapel was contradicted by a nascent wildness hovering about her lips. Edward tried to keep his attention on the prayers, and wished he was an Episcopalian, and had his prayers ready-made for him. He once mentioned this to his mother, who was much shocked. She said home-made prayers and home-made bread and home-made jam were the best. 'As for manufactured jam, it's a sloven's refuge, and no more to be said. And prayer's the same. The best printed prayer's no better than bought mixed at four-pence the pound, and a bit gone from keeping.' Edward stumbled on, as Mr. James said afterwards, 'like my old mare Betsy, a step and a stumble, a nod and a flop, and home in the Lord's own time--that's to say, the small hours.'