She had risen casually, as if to smooth the folds of the shawl that lay over the back of her chair, but the straight thrust of her keen blue eyes seeking the preacher’s made the air between them crackle with life. Draper drew himself up to the full of his enormous height. He was as superb and as sincere as a great coiled snake. He thrust out his jaw and frowned; his eyes lightened in the way they had, and the essential spirit within him met Miss Jinny’s steadily. The whole church held its breath. There was a moment of intense silence, through which the call of the flycatcher fanned its lazy way, and then an inward and spiritual something behind the frail old countenance broke something behind the big, glistening black face, with its prow of a nose, its curling lips and heavy jowl and restless, predatory eyes--broke it with a snap that might have been audible, so definite it was. Draper raised his hand and lowered it; opened his mouth and closed it again; drew forth the polka-dotted handkerchief and mopped the perspiration from his face. And then Miss Jinny sat down, and he found that he could speak. But whatever it was that had snapped in him had snapped, too, in his people. An uneasy sense of shame lay over them. There wasn’t one who didn’t know Tampa Simmons as he knew his own hearthstone; not one whom the dead man hadn’t helped and comforted when he could; who didn’t believe in him as no human being had ever believed in Draper. The tide of feeling flowed away from the preacher; ebbed faster and faster with his every word. He couldn’t tell what was stopping him. He was like a bird trying to fly through the pane of a window. Because he could not see it, he thought there was nothing there, and battered himself to pieces against the realest thing in all that country, going down at last before his congregation, a beaten man, jabbering meaningless sentences out of which one fact only stood up: that the soul of Tampa Simmons went to heaven, where Miss Jinny Pickens wanted it to go. And in the midst of the debacle a strange thing happened. Softly, spontaneously, without a leader, the people began to sing: “Done got over!” they sang: “Done got over! Had a hard time; Had to work so long; But I done got over, Done got over, Done got over at last!” The deep, old, patient, humble melody fell upon them like the spirit of Christ, and they bowed their heads and sank to their knees, and most of them wept.