The table was cleared, and then Mary put the Bible in front of Mr. Denner, and Jay's "Morning and Evening Exercises," open at the proper day. Two candles in massive candlesticks on either side of his book gave an unsteady light, and when they flickered threw strange shadows on the ceiling. The frames which held the paintings of Mr. Denner's grandparents loomed up dark and forbidding, and Mary, who always sat with her arms rolled in her apron and her head bowed upon her ample breast, made a grotesque shadow, which danced and bobbed about on the door of the pantry. Mary generally slept through prayers, while for Willie it was a time of nervous dread. The room was so dark, and his uncle's voice so strange and rolling, the little fellow feared to kneel down and turn his back to the long table with its ghastly white cloth; his imagination pictured fearful things stealing upon him from the mysterious space beneath it, and his heart beat so he could scarcely hear the words of the prayer. But Mr. Denner enjoyed it. Not, however, because prayer was the expression of his soul; family prayer was merely a dignified and proper observance. Mr. Denner would not; have omitted it any more than he would have neglected Sunday morning service; but he was scarcely more aware of the words than Willie or Mary were. It was the reading which gave Mr. Denner so much pleasure. Perhaps the cases he had never pleaded, the dramatic force which he secretly longed to exert, expended themselves in the sonorous chapters of Isaiah or in the wail of Jeremiah. Indeed, the thought had more than once occurred to Mr. Denner that the rector, who read the service with cheerful haste, might improve in his own delivery, could he listen to the eloquence under which Mary and little Willie sat every evening. To-night it was the victory of Jephtha. The reading proceeded as usual: Mary slumbered tranquilly at her end of the room; Willie counted the number of panes of glass in the window opposite him, and wondered what he should do if suddenly a white face should peer in at him out of the darkness; Mr. Denner had reached the vow that whatsoever should first meet Jephtha,--when, with his hand extended, his eyebrows drawn together, and his whole attitude expressing the anxiety and fear of the conqueror, he stopped abruptly. Here was an inspiration! Mary woke with a start. "Is it a stroke?" she exclaimed. But Willie, with one frightened look at the window and the long table, slipped from his chair to kneel, thinking the reading was over. The sound of his little copper-toed boots upon the floor aroused Mr. Denner; he frowned portentously. "_So Jephtha passed over unto the children of Ammon_," he read on, "_to fight against them, and the Lord delivered them into his hands_."