the panting Patsy was unable to answer her.

'The child's all right,' he blurted out at last. 'She said I might take
it and welcome, now it was a Protestant.'

'Ah, sure, you great thickhead of a boy! weren't you quick enough for
her?'

'Now, what are you talkin' about? Hadn't she half a mile start of me,
and the minister at the door just as I was gettin' over the last bit of
a wall!'

'And didn't you go in after them?'

'What would I be doin', going into a Protestant church?'

Patsy's sense of his responsibility was discussed violently until Father
Oliver said:

'Now, I can't be waiting any longer. Do you want me to baptize the child
or not?'

'It would be safer, wouldn't it?' said Mrs. Egan.

'It would,' said Father Oliver; 'the parson mightn't have said the words
while he was pouring the water.'

And, going towards the font with the child, Father Oliver took a cup of
water, but, having regard for the child's cries, he was a little sparing
with it.

'Now don't be sparin' with the water, your reverence, and don't be a
mindin' its noise; it's twicest the quantity of holy water it'll be
wanting, and it half an hour a Protestant.'

It was at that moment Mrs. Rean appeared in the doorway, and Patsy
Kivel, who didn't care to enter the Protestant church, rushed to put her
out of his.

'You can do what you like now with the child; it's a Protestant, for all
your tricks.'

'Go along, you old heretic bitch!'

'Now, Patsy, will you behave yourself when you're standing in the
Church of God! Be leaving the woman alone,' said Father Oliver; but
before he got to the door to separate the two, Mrs. Rean was running
down the chapel yard followed by the crowd of disputants, and he heard
the quarrel growing fainter in the village street.

Rose-coloured clouds had just begun to appear midway in the pale
sky--a beautiful sky, all gray and rose--and all this babble about
baptism seemed strangely out of his mind. 'And to think that men are
still seeking scrolls in Turkestan to prove--' The sentence did not
finish itself in his mind; a ray of western light falling across the
altar steps in the stillness of the church awakened a remembrance in him
of the music that Nora's hands drew from the harmonium, and, leaning
against the Communion-rails, he allowed the music to absorb him. He
could hear it so distinctly in his mind that he refrained from going up
into the gallery and playing it, for in his playing he would perceive