The listeners appeared to feel this no less than Somerset did, for their eyes, one and all, became fixed upon that vestry door as if they would almost push it open by the force of their gazing.

The preacher's heart was full and bitter; no book or note was wanted by him; never was spontaneity more absolute than here.

It was no timid reproof of the ornamental kind, but a direct denunciation, all the more vigorous perhaps from the limitation of mind and language under which the speaker laboured.

Yet, fool that he had been made by the candidate, there was nothing acrid in his attack.

Genuine flashes of rhetorical fire were occasionally struck by that plain and simple man, who knew what straightforward conduct was, and who did not know the illimitable caprice of a woman's mind.
At this moment there was not in the whole chapel a person whose imagination was not centred on what was invisibly taking place within the vestry.