The City of Fire - Page 103/221

Laurie got out his cigarette case, selected a cigarette, got out his

match box, selected a match, and all but lit it. Then somehow there

seemed to be something incongruous about the action and he looked

around. No one was seeing him but Opal, and she was laughing at him. He

flushed, put back the match and the cigarette, and folded his arms,

trying to look at home in this strange new environment. But the girl

Marilyn's eyes were far away as if she were drinking strange knowledge

at a secret invisible source, and she seemed to have forgotten their

presence.

Then the family knelt. How odd! Knelt down, each where he had been

sitting, and the minister began to talk to God. It did not impress the

visitors as prayer. They involuntarily looked around to see to whom he

was talking. Laurie reddened again and dropped his face into his hands.

He had met Opal's eyes and she was shaking with mirth, but somehow it

affected him rawly. Suddenly he felt impelled to get to his knees. He

seemed conspicuous reared up in a chair, and he slid noiselessly to the

floor with a wrench of the hurt ankle that caused him to draw his brows

in a frown. Opal, left alone in this room full of devout backs, grew

suddenly grave.

She felt almost afraid. She began to think of Saybrook

Inn and the man lying there stark and dead! The man she had danced with

but a week before! Dead! And for her! She cringed, and crouched down in

her chair, till her beaded frock swept the polished floor in a little

tinkley sound that seemed to echo all over the room, and before she

knew it her fear of being alone had brought her to her knees. To be

like the rest of the world--to be even more alike than anybody else in

the world, that had always been her ambition. The motive of her life

now brought her on her knees because others were there and she was

afraid to sit above lest their God should come walking by and she

should see Him and die! She did not know she put it that way to her

soul, but she did, in the secret recesses of her inner dwelling.

Before they had scarcely got to their knees and while that awkward hush

was yet upon them the room was filled with the soft sound of singing,

started by the minister, perhaps, or was it his wife? It was

unaccompanied, "Abide with me, Fast falls the eventide, the darkness

deepens, Lord with me abide!" Even Laurie joined an erratic high tenor

humming in on the last verse, and Opal shuddered as the words were

sung, "Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes, Shine through the

dark and point me to the skies." Death was a horrible thing to her. She

never wanted to be reminded of death. It was a long, long way off to

her. She always drowned the thought in whatever amusement was at hand.