Next morning Mrs. Cole was still alive. There had been no change during the night; to-day, the doctor said, would be the critical day. To-day was Sunday, and Mr. Cole took his morning service at his church as usual. He had been up all night; he looked haggard and pale, still wearing that expression as of a man lost in a world that he had always trusted. But he would not fail in his duty. “When two or three are gathered together in my name....” Perhaps God would hear him.

It was a day of wonderful heat for May. No one had ever remembered so hot a day at so early a time of year. The windows of the church were open, but no breeze blew through the aisles. The relentless blazing blue of the sky penetrated into the cool shadows of the church, and it was as though the congregation sat there under shimmering glass. The waves of light shifted, rose and fell above the bonnets and hats and bare heads, and all the little choir boys fell asleep during the sermon.

The Cole family did not fall asleep. They sat with pale faces and stiff backs staring at their father and thinking about their mother. Mary and Helen were frightened; the house was so strange, everyone spoke in whispers, and, on the way into church, many ladies had asked them how their mother was.

They felt important as well as sad. But Jeremy did not feel important. He had not heard the ladies and their questions—he would not have cared if he had. People had always called him “a queer little boy,” simply because he was independent and thought more than he spoke. Nevertheless, he had always in reality been normal enough until now. To-day he was really “queer,” was conscious for the first time of the existence of a world whose adjacence to the real world was, in after days, to trouble him so often and to complicate life for him so grievously. The terror that had come down upon him when his father had left him seemed to-day utterly to soak through into the very heart of him. His mother was going to die unless something or somebody saved her. What was dying? Going away, he had always been told, with a golden harp, to sing hymns in a foreign country. But to-day the picture would not form so easily. There was silence and darkness and confusion about this Death. His mother was going, against her will, and no one could tell him whither she was going. If he could only stop her dying, force God to leave her alone, to leave her with them all as she had been before...

He fixed his eyes upon his father, who climbed slowly into his pulpit and gave out the text of his sermon. To-day he would talk about the sacrifice of Isaac. “Abraham, as his hearers would remember...” and so on.

Jeremy listened, and gradually there grew before his eyes the figure of a strange and terrible God. This was no new figure. He had never thought directly about God, but for a very long time now he had had Him in the background of his life as Polchester Town Hall was in the background. But now he definitely and actively figured to himself this God, this God Who was taking his mother away and was intending apparently to put her into some dark place where she would know nobody. It must be some horrible place, because his father looked so frightened, which he would not look if his mother was simply going, with a golden harp, to sing hymns. Jeremy had always heard that this God was loving and kind and tender, but the figure whom his father was now drawing for the benefit of the congregation was none of these things.

Mr. Cole spoke of a God just and terrible, but a God Who apparently for the merest fancy put His faithful servant to terrible anguish and distress, and then for another fancy, as light as the first, spared him his sorrow. Mr. Cole emphasised the necessity for obedience, the need for a willing surrender of anything that may be dear to us, “because the love of God must be greater than anything that holds us here on earth.” But Jeremy did not listen to these remarks; his mind was filled with this picture of a vast shadowy figure, seated in the sky, his white beard flowing beneath eyes that frowned from dark rocky eyebrows out upon people like Jeremy who, although doing their best, were nevertheless at the mercy of any whim that He might have. This terrible figure was the author of the hot day, author of the silent house and the shimmering darkened church, author of the decision to take his mother away from all that she loved and put her somewhere where she would be alone and cold and silent—“simply because He wishes...”

“From this beautiful passage,” concluded Mr. Cole, “we learn that God is just and merciful, but that He demands our obedience. We must be ready at any instant to give up what we love most and best....”

Afterwards they all trooped out into the splendid sunshine.