"No, Emma, you will do as I direct. One can never be too particular
about returning books. You have kept it an unconscionable time. You
will bring it to the vicarage at four o'clock."
"Please mum, I--I can't at four o'clock."
"And pray, Emma, what is to prevent you?"
"I--I'm going to Baker's, mum."
"Going to Baker's? Why are you going to Baker's, Emma?"
So it all came out.
The bells were just stopping, and Mrs. Morrison, who played the organ,
was forced to hurry in without having told Emma her whole opinion of
those who gave and those who attended Sunday parties, but the prelude
she played that day expressed the tumult of her mind very well, and
struck Tussie Shuttleworth, who had sensitive ears, quite cold. He was
the only person in the church acutely sensitive to sound, and it was
very afflicting to him, this plunging among the pedals, this angry
shrieking of stops no man ever yet had heard together. The very blower
seemed frightened, and blew in gasps; and the startled Tussie,
comparing the sounds to the clamourings of a fiend in pain, could not
possibly guess they were merely the musical expression of the state of
a just woman's soul.
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