"I wonder what that is supposed to be?" whispered Marion. "It sounds like something dreadfully solemn. I hope they are not going to have any scenes. Revivals are not fashionable except in the winter."
"Marion, _don't_!" Flossy said, in an earnest undertone. The gay, and what for the first time struck her as the sacrilegious words, chilled her. And for almost the first time in her life she uttered an unhesitating remonstrance. Something in the tone surprised Marion, and she looked curiously down at her little companion, but said not another word.
The covenant service was the simplest of all services; in fact, only the singing of a familiar hymn and the offering of a prayer. But the hymn was read first, in such solemn, tender, pleading tones as it seemed to Flossy she had never heard before; and the singing rolled around that great tent like the voices of the ten thousand who sing before the throne--at least to Flossy's heart it seemed like that. The prayer that followed was the simplest of all prayers as to words, and the briefest public prayer she ever remembered to have heard, and it made her feel as nothing in life had ever done before. She did not understand the cause for her emotion; she was not acquainted with the Spirit of God; she did not know that he was speaking to her softened heart, and calling her gently to himself, so she felt ashamed of the emotion that she could not help. She wiped the tears away secretly, and was glad that the night was dark and the need for haste great, for the steamer's warning whistle could already be beard. Marion talked on as they went down the hill, not alone now but accompanied by hundreds, talked precisely as she had before the singing of those words and the prayer. "How could she?" Flossy wondered. "How could anything look the same to her?" The Spirit had found no softened heart in which to leave a message, and so had passed by. This, if Flossy had known it, was the reason that Marion was gay and indifferent. If either of them had fully realized the reason for the different effect of the meeting upon them, how startled they would have been! It is not strange after all that a service is not the same to one soul that it is to another, when we remember that God speaks to one and passes another.