Laurie got out his cigarette case, selected a cigarette, got out his
match box, selected a match, and all but lit it. Then somehow there
seemed to be something incongruous about the action and he looked
around. No one was seeing him but Opal, and she was laughing at him. He
flushed, put back the match and the cigarette, and folded his arms,
trying to look at home in this strange new environment. But the girl
Marilyn's eyes were far away as if she were drinking strange knowledge
at a secret invisible source, and she seemed to have forgotten their
presence.
Then the family knelt. How odd! Knelt down, each where he had been
sitting, and the minister began to talk to God. It did not impress the
visitors as prayer. They involuntarily looked around to see to whom he
was talking. Laurie reddened again and dropped his face into his hands.
He had met Opal's eyes and she was shaking with mirth, but somehow it
affected him rawly. Suddenly he felt impelled to get to his knees. He
seemed conspicuous reared up in a chair, and he slid noiselessly to the
floor with a wrench of the hurt ankle that caused him to draw his brows
in a frown. Opal, left alone in this room full of devout backs, grew
suddenly grave.
She felt almost afraid. She began to think of Saybrook
Inn and the man lying there stark and dead! The man she had danced with
but a week before! Dead! And for her! She cringed, and crouched down in
her chair, till her beaded frock swept the polished floor in a little
tinkley sound that seemed to echo all over the room, and before she
knew it her fear of being alone had brought her to her knees. To be
like the rest of the world--to be even more alike than anybody else in
the world, that had always been her ambition. The motive of her life
now brought her on her knees because others were there and she was
afraid to sit above lest their God should come walking by and she
should see Him and die! She did not know she put it that way to her
soul, but she did, in the secret recesses of her inner dwelling.
Before they had scarcely got to their knees and while that awkward hush
was yet upon them the room was filled with the soft sound of singing,
started by the minister, perhaps, or was it his wife? It was
unaccompanied, "Abide with me, Fast falls the eventide, the darkness
deepens, Lord with me abide!" Even Laurie joined an erratic high tenor
humming in on the last verse, and Opal shuddered as the words were
sung, "Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes, Shine through the
dark and point me to the skies." Death was a horrible thing to her. She
never wanted to be reminded of death. It was a long, long way off to
her. She always drowned the thought in whatever amusement was at hand.