She looked quickly round the church, her mind swelling with the sense of the Cravens' injustice and distrust.
Never could she be more conscious than here--on this very spot--of mission, of an urging call to the service of man.

In front of her was the Boyces' family pew, carved and becushioned, but behind it stretched bench after bench of plain and humble oak, on which the village sat when it came to church.

Here, for the first time, had Marcella been brought face to face with the agricultural world as it is--no stage ruralism, but the bare fact in one of its most pitiful aspects.

Men of sixty and upwards, grey and furrowed like the chalk soil into which they had worked their lives; not old as age goes, but already the refuse of their generation, and paid for at the rate of refuse; with no prospect but the workhouse, if the grave should be delayed, yet quiet, impassive, resigned, now showing a furtive childish amusement if a schoolboy misbehaved, or a dog strayed into church, now joining with a stolid unconsciousness in the tremendous sayings of the Psalms; women coarse, or worn, or hopeless; girls and boys and young children already blanched and emaciated beyond even the normal Londoner from the effects of insanitary cottages, bad water, and starvation food--these figures and types had been a ghastly and quickening revelation to Marcella.

In London the agricultural labourer, of whom she had heard much, had been to her as a pawn in the game of discussion.