This was the unknown girl the stranger was seeking, but who in her turn perhaps had been seeking Low--the girl who absorbed his fancy--the secret of his absences, his preoccupation, his coldness! This was the girl whom to see, perhaps in his arms, she was now periling her liberty and her life unknown to him! A slight odor, some faint perfume of its owner, came from the book; it was the same she had noticed in the dress Low had given her.

She flung the volume to the ground, and, throwing her arms over the back of the pew before her, buried her face in her hands.
In that light and attitude she might have seemed some rapt acolyte abandoned to self-communion.

But whatever yearning her soul might have had for higher sympathy or deeper consolation, I fear that the spiritual Tabernacle of Excelsior and the Reverend Mr.Wynn did not meet that requirement.

She only felt the dry, oven-like heat of that vast shell, empty of sentiment and beauty, hollow in its pretense and dreary in its desolation.

She only saw in it a chief altar for the glorification of this girl who had absorbed even the pure worship of her companion, and converted and degraded his sublime paganism to her petty creed.