In the minister’s pew, a little way to the left of the front of the pulpit, sat a pale and faded ghost of a woman. She sat in the middle of the pew, and on her right, looking very uneasy in tight jackets and broad white collars, sat five stout boys. On her left, in stiffly starched sun-bonnets and white aprons, were four print and meek-faced girls. Mrs. Holworthy was looking more than commonly pale and fragile on this particular May morning. The delicate blue veins in her white throat and in her slender wrists showed plainly. Two or three times that morning Mr. Holworthy had sent peremptory word out from his study that the children must be kept more quiet, as he was putting the finishing touches on his great sermon, “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour.” Two or three times that morning, while undergoing the fatigues of preparing the children for church, Mrs. Holworthy had stopped with a sudden fainting and fluttering at her heart. And now, while she turned her white, patient face toward the pulpit, strange fancies began to crowd her mind, interrupted only when Mr. Holworthy, in rounding off one of his turgid periods, brought out with extra force the beautiful words of St. Paul, “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour.” In Mrs. Holworthy’s fancy, she seemed to see herself as she was at eighteen, a joyous care-free girl, with many tastes for art and books, and high companionships and charity, and great and noble deeds. Life, then, had stretched before her like a flower-strewn pathway, not devoid of suffering and sacrifice, to be sure, but the suffering and the sacrifice were to have had the sweetness and recompense of being her chosen own, freely accepted and joyfully submitted to with the sublime consciousness of her own soul’s development thereby.