hick waves over a
broad brow. Mark noticed that his cassock was old and faded, but that
reddish buttons down its front distinguished it from the cassocks of
other village priests he had seen on his travels.

"You are welcome, Mr. Griffin--very welcome." Mark found Father
Murray's voice pleasing. "Sit down right over there. That chair is
more comfortable than it looks. I call it 'Old Hickory' because,
though it isn't hickory, yet it began life in this old house and has
outlived three pastors. Smoke?"

"Thanks, I do--but a pipe, you know. I'm hopelessly British." Mark
pulled out his pipe and a pouch of tobacco.

Turning to the wicker table beside him, the priest dug down into an old
cigar box filled with the odds and ends that smokers accumulate. He
found a pipe and filled it from Mark's extended tobacco pouch.

"It's poor hospitality, Mr. Griffin, to take your tobacco; but I
offered you a cigar. You know, this cigar habit has so grown into me
that it's a rare occasion that brings me back to old times and my
pipe." Father Murray pressed the tobacco down into the bowl. "How
long are you to be with us, Mr. Griffin?"

Mark was dropping into a lazy mood again; it was very comfortable on
the veranda. "I haven't fixed a time for going on. I beg your pardon,
but aren't those buttons significant? I once spent six months in Rome.
Aren't you what they call a _Monsignore_?"

"Don't tell them so here, or I'll lose my standing. Yes, I am a
prelate, a Domestic Prelate to His Holiness. I am afraid it is the
domesticity of the title that sticks here in Sihasset, rather than the
prelacy. My people are poor--mostly mill workers. I have never shown
them the purple. It might frighten them out of saying 'Father.'"

"But surely--" Mark hesitated.

"Oh, yes, I know what you are thinking. I did like it at first, but I
was younger then, and more ambitious. You know, Mr. Griffin, I find
that the priesthood is something like a river. The farther you go from
the source the deeper and wider it gets; and it's at its best as it
nears the ocean. Even when it empties into the wider waters, it isn't
quite lost. It's in the beginning that you notice the flowers on the
bank. Coming toward the end, it's--well, different."

"You are not beginning to think you are old?"

"No." Father Murray was very positive. "I am not old yet; but I'm
getting there, for I'm forty-five. Only five years until I strike the
half-century m