He found the nerve, all the same, to take this third trustee by the hand, and to thank him for his congratulations, and even to say, with a surface smile of welcome, "It is BROTHER Gorringe, now, I remember."The work before the meeting was chiefly of a routine kind.
In most places this would have been transacted by the stewards;but in Octavius these minor officials had degenerated into mere ceremonial abstractions, who humbly ratified, or by arrangement anticipated, the will of the powerful, mortgage-owning trustees.Theron sat languidly at the head of the table while these common-place matters passed in their course, noting the intonations of Gorringe's voice as he read from his secretary's book, and finding his ear displeased by them.No issue arose upon any of these trivial affairs, and the minister, feeling faint and weary in the heat, wondered why Sister Soulsby had insisted on his coming.
All at once he sat up straight, with an instinctive warning in his mind that here was the thing.Gorringe had taken up the subject of the "debt-raising" evening, and read out its essentials as they had been embodied in a report of the stewards.
The gross sum obtained, in cash and promises, was $1,860.
The stewards had collected of this a trifle less than half, but hoped to get it all in during the ensuing quarter.
There were, also, the bill of Mr.and Mrs.Soulsby for $150, and the increases of $100 in the pastor's salary and $25 in the apportioned contribution of the charge toward the Presiding Elder's maintenance, the two latter items of which the Quarterly Conference had sanctioned.
"I want to hear the names of the subscribers and their amounts read out," put in Brother Pierce.