Violet Jacob > Irresolute Catherine

PENCOED
131
single person, a single voice, under that roof.
They had reached the last lines:
“Ye men of God, lift up your souls,
Nor halt with failing breath;
Yet one more stream before us rolls,
The dark blue flood of death.
Across its waves our pathway lies,
The hosts go on before ;
And Zion’s city meets our eyes
Set on the other shore.”
As the singing ceased, Heber shut his
book and looked round like one awakened,
straight at Susannah. The act was so
spontaneous that neither he nor the woman,
whose gaze was fixed on him, had time to
return from the widely separated regions
in which their respective souls roamed.
In that instant there was revealed to the
shepherd the thing that he had never sus¬
pected. Perhaps the feelings roused by the
strenuous, half-militant spirit of the hymn
and the beat of its swinging music had
lighted the whole range of his imagination ;