He glanced at his notes occasionally, and then put them resolutely away, well aware that they would be all but useless to him.

Either he would, at the last, be able to formulate the thoughts that raced through his head, or else he could do no more than occupy the pulpit for the conventional twenty minutes with a conventional sermon.

At times he half thought he would follow this easier course, but then the great letters of the newspaper poster seemed to frame themselves before him, and he knew he could not.

And so, at last, there was the bowing beadle with the silver mace, and he must set out on the little dignified procession to the great Jacobean pulpit with its velvet cushion at the top.
Hilda's mind was a curious study during that sermon.

At first, as her lover's rather close-cropped, dark-haired head appeared in sight, she had studied him with an odd mixture of pride and apprehension.