He did not go straight home as he had said, but up the road to Lawyer Bascombe’s office. When he returned, the meeting in his brother’s house was in session, and the windows were dark with heads against the red firelight. Old Simeon stared up at them, and laughed aloud to himself as he went by. “Sophy Anne won’t make me no mince-pies. She’s sure on’t,” he said, and laughed again. The next day all the ordinary routine of life seemed at a standstill in the village. The storekeeper had become a convert, the store was closed, and the green inside shutters were fastened. Now and then a village loafer lounged disconsolately up, shook the door on its rattling lock, stared at the shuttered windows, then lounged away, muttering. The summer resting-place of his kind, the long, bewhittled wooden bench on the store platform, could not be occupied that wintry day. The air was clear, and the dry pastures were white and stiff with the hoar-frost; the slants of the roofs glistened with it in the sun. The breaths of the people going to and from Solomon Lennox’s house were like white smoke. The meeting began at dawn. Children were dragged hither at their parents’ heels, cold and breakfastless. Not a meal was cooked that day in the houses of Solomon Lennox’s followers. All the precious hours were spent in fasting and prayer. Towards night the excitement deepened. There was present within the village a spiritual convulsion as real as any other convulsion of nature, and as truly although more subtly felt. Even they who had scoffed and laughed at this new movement from the first, and were now practically untouched by it, grew nervous and ill at ease towards night as from the gathering of a storm. The air seemed charged with electricity generated by the touch of human thought and faith with the Unknown. The unbelievers pressed their faces against the window-panes, shading their eyes from the light within as the dusk deepened, or stood out in their yards watching the sky, half fearful they should indeed see some sign or marvel therein. But the night came on, and the stars shone out in their order as they had done from the first, and there was no sign but the old one of eternal love and beauty in the sky. The moon arose at nine o’clock, nearly at her full. That, from some interpretation of symbolical characters on the deaf-and-dumb boy’s slate, had been fixed upon as the hour of meeting upon Penfield’s hill. The solemn and dreadful moment which was to mark the climax of all creation was expected between that hour and dawn. At half-past eight white-robed figures began to move along the road. People peeped around their curtains to see them pass; now and then belated children ran shrieking with terror into the houses at sight of them.