Page:Dale - A Marriage Below Zero.djvu/272

266 His strange tone surprised me—accustomed as I was, by this time, to surprise.

"Probably not," I said. "Popular preachers, as a rule, do not deliver old sermons, I should think,—for their own sakes."

"Let us go home," he said. "I can't sit through the rest of the service."

As we were going out Arthur asked one of the ushers anxiously if the Doctor were going to speak again that night. The usher smiled.

"No," he said. "One lecture is all he can manage. He exhausts himself. He's as weak as a rat after one of his talks."

My ideas upon the weakness of rats being decidedly limited, I could only infer from the context that it was extreme. We passed out into the street.

"I did not want to hear him again," said Arthur presently, as we walked homewards, "but if he had spoken to-night I feel I must have gone. What an awful sermon!"

"It was indeed," I assented, "we are surely not such hopeless cases as that man wants to make out."