Besides the drawbacks of the best clothes and the bag there were usually many admonitions from her uncle, such as, "Marjory, turn out your toes. Hold up your head, child. Turn out your toes, I say," or, "O Marjory, do not swing that bag"--all very necessary, no doubt, but they had the effect of making the girl self-conscious. Thinking about her head, she would forget about her toes, and _vice versâ_, and her uncle would be apt to think that it was obstinacy on her part and to tell her so, and then there would be sullen silence till the church door was reached. But to-day it was not so. Half-way to church they joined the Foresters, and Marjory and Blanche walked together behind their elders, so that their deportment could not be criticised.
Blanche gave Marjory the cheerful news that as there was to be a children's service in the afternoon, Mrs. Forester was going to beg for Marjory to be let off writing the morning sermon if she wrote the afternoon one instead.
"I don't suppose uncle will say yes, though," objected Marjory.
"Oh yes, he will; people always do to mother."
"How different it would be!" sighed Marjory. "I'm sure I could understand it better if I didn't have to keep thinking about writing it out."
"And mother's going to ask Dr. Hunter to come to tea, and you will come home from church with us. Won't it be nice?"
"Yes; but I don't believe he will let me." Blanche's face clouded. "Oh," she said, disappointment in her tone, "why not?"
"I've never been out anywhere on Sunday."
"But this is different--it isn't like going to a party; and we have such nice Sundays, and I do want you to come. I love Sundays, and I always look forward to them; don't you?"
"No," replied Marjory candidly, "not much."
Blanche looked sympathetically at her friend.
"Well, of course yours don't seem to be quite so nice as ours; but you'll see they'll be different now."
Blanche was right. Mrs. Forester won the day, and to Marjory's intense satisfaction, as they went in at the churchyard gate her uncle told her that she need not write the morning sermon if she would do the afternoon one, and that she was to be allowed to go to tea at Braeside after the service.
The Heathermuir church was an old one; its pews were of the straight, high-backed kind, and once inside them their occupants could see little of their surroundings except the minister, whose desk was raised above the level of the floor. With no temptations to look about her, and relieved of her weekly task, Marjory gave her whole attention to Mr. Mackenzie, trying to understand his meaning instead of mechanically taxing her memory, parrot-like, with his words. She watched the noble old face with its lines of kindliness and patience, the eyes now liquid with pity for the sorrowful wrongdoer, now flashing with indignation as he spoke of the unrepentant and the careless, then softening again as he expressed the hope that their hearts might be touched, and the belief that they too would win forgiveness from a loving Father.