The large charity of Hingston covered the multitude of the Squire's sins; he would have argued that he had not been understood perhaps in the worst things he said; but the fiercer godliness of Enraghty was proof against the talk of a man whose conversation was an exhalation from the Pit. He had bitterly opposed Matthew Braile's successive elections; he had made the pulpit of the Temple an engine of political warfare and had launched its terrors against the invulnerable heathen. He was like Hingston in looking for a sign; in that day of remoteness from any greater world the people of the backwoods longed to feel themselves near the greatest world of all, and well within the radius of its mysteries. They talked mostly of these when they met together, and in the solitude of their fields they dwelt upon them; on their week days and work days they turned over the threats and promises of the Sabbath and expected a light or a voice from on high which should burst their darkness and silence. To most of them there was nothing sacrilegious in the pretensions which could be read into the closely scriptured discourse of Dylks when he preached the second time in the Temple. The affability which he used in descending from the pulpit among them, and shaking hands and hailing them Brother and Sister, and personally bidding each come to the mercy seat, convinced them of his authority; no common man would so fearlessly trust his dignity among those who had little of their own. They thronged upon him gladly, and the women, old and young alike, trembled before him with a strange joy. “Where is your father, Sister Gillespie?” he demanded of the girl, who wavered in his strong voice like a plant in the wind. “I don't know--he's at home,” she said. “See that he comes, another time. I send him my peace, and tell him that it will not return to me. Say that I said he needs me.” He went out between Enraghty and Hingston, and as they walked away, he sank his voice back in words of Scripture; farther away he began his hymn: “Plunged in a gulf of dark despair, We wretched sinners lay”-- and ended with his shout of “Salvation!” VII The cabin of the Reverdys stood on a byway beyond the Gillespies. Sally had joined the girl on her way out of the Temple, and was prancing beside her as they went homeward together. “Oh, ain't it just great? I feel like as if I could fly. I never seen the Power in Leatherwood like it was to-night. He's _sent_; you can tell that as plain as the nose on your face. How happy I do feel! I believe in my heart I got salvation this minute. Don't you feel the Spirit any? But you was always such a still girl! I did like the way the women folks was floppun' all round. _I_ say, if you feel the Power workun' in you, show it, and help the others to git it. What do you s'pose he meant by your paw's needun' him?” “I don't know. Perhaps _he_ will,” the girl answered briefly.