Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/83

Rh an amphitheatre-like half circle. Even here stood the trees, thick and undisturbed, making of the circle of seats a many-pillared temple, canopied with green and roofed with blue. Fronting this had been built an elevated platform for the elders and the preaching—and on this, at the moment John entered the circle, had just risen a corpulent, round-faced, sonorous-voiced man, Bishop Worrell, who was to preach that afternoon's sermon. John stopped, leaned against a young hickory tree, and looked carefully up and down the rows of seats in search of Hiram Peet. At last he saw him sitting between his wife and his wife's mother, in the very middle of the circle, and only five seats back from the platform.

"I suppose it would be as much as Hi's life was worth to get up and come out from there before all these people," thought John. "I might as well give it up."

Then he fell to laughing so immoderately at Hi's expression of face, that he had to turn suddenly away, lest he should shock the sensibilities of the grave and decorous congregation. As he turned, he suddenly caught a glimpse of the profile of a girl who sat in the same seat with Hiram Peet, but at the farther end of it. The sight of this profile arrested John Bassett's steps as suddenly as a strong hand laid on his shoulder could have done. He stood still, with his eyes fixed on the face. He did not say to himself, "How beautiful!" he did