Anything like physical deformity was especially obnoxious to Mr. Wayt. The most onerous duties pertaining to his holy office were visitation of the sick and burial of the dead. Hester’s beautiful golden hair, falling far below her waist, veiled her humped shoulders, and her refined face looking out from this aureole, as she lay in her wheeled chair, would be picturesquely interesting in the chancel, if not seen too often there. The coarse realism of her refusal routed him completely. With an artistic shudder and a look of eloquent misery, likewise directed at his wife, he withdrew his forces from the field. That night she read “Sartor Resartus” to him from three o’clock until 6 A. M., so intolerable was his agony of sleeplessness. It happened so often that Hetty was the only responsible member of the family who could remain at home with the crippled girl, that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Wayt seemed to remark that her churchgoing was less than nominal. Hester called Sunday her “white-letter day,” and was usually then in her best and most tolerant temper, while her fellow-sinner looked forward to the comparative rest and liberty it afforded as the wader in marshlands eyes a projecting shoulder of firm ground and dry turf. It was never more welcome than on the fair May day when the Fairhill “people” crowded the First Church to hear the new pulpit star. “The prayer which preceded the sermon was a sacred lyric,” said the Monday issue of the _Fairhill Pointer_. “In this respect Rev. Mr. Wayt is as remarkably gifted as in the oratory which moved his auditors alternately to tears, and smiles, and glows of religious fervor. We regret the impossibility of reporting the burning stream of supplication and ascription that flowed from his heart through his lips, but a fragment of the introduction, uttered slowly and impressively, is herewith given verbatim, as a sample of incomparable felicity of diction: “‘THOU art mighty, merciful, masterful, and majestic. _We_ are feeble, fickle, finite, and fading.’”[A] March Gilchrist had his say anent the sample sentence on the way home from church. He was not connected with the press, and his criticism went no further than the ears of his somewhat scandalized and decidedly diverted sister. In intuitive anticipation of the reportorial eulogy, he affirmed that the diction was _not_ incomparable. “I heard a Georgia negro preacher beat it all hollow,” he said. “He began with: ‘THOU art all-sufficient, self-sufficient, and _in_-sufficient!’” “March Gilchrist! How dreadful!” They were passing the side windows of the parsonage, which opened upon a quiet cross street. May’s laugh rippled through the bowed shutters of the dining room behind which sat a girl in a blue flannel gown, holding upon her knee and against her shoulder a hunchbacked child with a weirdly wise face. They were watching the people coming home from church.