priests. "The Church still has her cavalry."

As the troop swept past the graveyard half a mile east of the
town,--the first frame church of the parish had stood there,--old
Pierre Seguin was already out with his pick and spade, digging
Amedee's grave. He knelt and uncovered as the bishop passed. The
boys with one accord looked away from old Pierre to the red church
on the hill, with the gold cross flaming on its steeple.

Mass was at eleven. While the church was filling, Emil Bergson waited
outside, watching the wagons and buggies drive up the hill. After
the bell began to ring, he saw Frank Shabata ride up on horseback
and tie his horse to the hitch-bar. Marie, then, was not coming.
Emil turned and went into the church. Amedee's was the only empty
pew, and he sat down in it. Some of Amedee's cousins were there,
dressed in black and weeping. When all the pews were full, the
old men and boys packed the open space at the back of the church,
kneeling on the floor. There was scarcely a family in town that was
not represented in the confirmation class, by a cousin, at least.
The new communicants, with their clear, reverent faces, were beautiful
to look upon as they entered in a body and took the front benches
reserved for them. Even before the Mass began, the air was charged
with feeling. The choir had never sung so well and Raoul Marcel,
in the "Gloria," drew even the bishop's eyes to the organ loft.
For the offertory he sang Gounod's "Ave Maria,"--always spoken of
in Sainte-Agnes as "the Ave Maria."

Emil began to torture himself with questions about Marie. Was she
ill? Had she quarreled with her husband? Was she too unhappy to
find comfort even here? Had she, perhaps, thought that he would
come to her? Was she waiting for him? Overtaxed by excitement
and sorrow as he was, the rapture of the service took hold upon his
body and mind. As he listened to Raoul, he seemed to emerge from
the conflicting emotions which had been whirling him about and
sucking him under. He felt as if a clear light broke upon his
mind, and with it a conviction that good was, after all, stronger
than evil, and that good was possible to men. He seemed to discover
that there was a kind of rapture in which he could love forever
without faltering and without sin. He looked across the heads of
the people at Frank Shabata with calmness. That rapture was for those
who could feel it; for people who could not, it was non-existent.
He coveted nothing th