As the service progressed, with its stately and impressive words and forms, Richard felt keenly the influence of his surroundings. He had been brought up in the atmosphere of the church, and under its caress the highest dreams and aspirations of his early youth were revivified. Before long he had forgotten John Fenton and Gertrude Van Vleck; and as the soft strains of Lenten music stole through the perfumed air, the face of a brown-eyed woman whose gaze was sad and tearful filled his soul with remorse. He felt like one who had committed sacrilege. The garish glitter, the tawdry brilliancy, of the night he had spent in Bohemia seemed to him at that moment pitifully repulsive. The dark face of the girl who had fascinated him for the moment told its true story as he recalled it in the calm and holy precincts of the temple where he sat. That he had yielded to the debasing influence that she had exerted at the time was a fact that filled him with amazement and discontent. “What strange coincidence is this?” he exclaimed to himself, as the words of the Epistle for the Third Sunday in Lent seemed to voice the thoughts that were surging through his brain: “Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; and walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour. But all uncleanness, let it not be once named amongst you, as becometh saints; neither foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not convenient: but rather giving of thanks. Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them. For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret.” Richard Stoughton was of an extremely impressionable temperament, and time had not yet hardened the shell that surrounds the soul. It seemed to him at that moment as though the inspired word of God had spoken to him alone in that consecrated temple, and had warned him to seek higher things; to avoid, for the sake of a great reward, the mud-holes and pitfalls in the path before him. He knelt in prayer with a reverential fervor that was new to him.