The farmers who are awake are leaning forward, their hands to their ears to catch the Gospel words that never reach them. Lady Millbank has fallen gracefully asleep. Sarah is still weeping copiously, but now, thank Heaven, quietly. The curate, vainly striving to pronounce his ‘this’ and his ‘that,’ grows more and more nervous. He leans over the pulpit, and thunders at the sleeping farmers and at the leading families around, in whose pews, too, Somnus is holding a full court. Farther and farther he leans, striving with his parishioners as much as with his teeth; a very passion of anxiety grows upon him. He lifts his arms from the desk before him—the desk that is supporting him—and waves them frantically. ‘Hear—hear, my brethren,’ cries he. ‘Hear and see——’ His cry, like the ‘Excelsior’ young man’s clarion, rings loud and clear. It wakes some of the sleepy members, who look up to see what it is all about. But when they do look up there is nothing to see. Most unexpectedly and disgracefully—considering its relation to the Church—the footstool has given way with a crash, and Mr. Haldane, the curate, has given way with it, and disappeared, holus bolus, into the big old pulpit. For quite a minute, though no doubt ‘to memory dear,’ the curate is certainly ‘lost to sight;’ and when at last he ventures once more to mount the offending stool, and look down at his parishioners, it is to find that the far larger half of them are gladly streaming down the aisle to the fresh air outside, under the fond delusion that ‘church is over.’ These are the specially drowsy ones. The crash caused by the curate’s unpremeditated descent had roused them from their happy dreams, and, on opening their eyes, seeing no preacher in the pulpit, they had naturally come to the conclusion that the performance was at an end. Vain to call them back. Mr. Haldane spreads out his arms to heaven in a mournful appeal, but, hearing some unmistakable tittering to his left, turns, and incontinently flies. CHAPTER XVIII. ‘Life is thorny, and youth is vain!’ Not so quickly as Susan, however. He could hardly have flown with the fleetness of that heart-troubled nymph. She—at the first chance, when her father, rising hurriedly at the flight of his curate, had breathed the blessing—had flown down the side-aisle and through the small oak door into the golden air outside; and from there into a small lane filled with flowering weeds, that led straight homewards. Running—racing, indeed—goes Susan, with her heart on fire, as her cheeks, and her lovely, child-like eyes darkened and bright with the sense of coming disaster. She does not draw breath until she finds herself safe in her own little room, with just five precious minutes (precious, unusual five minutes, gained only by that swift run that has left them all behind) in which to think out as calmly as she can what has befallen her.