isible,
remained standing for a few seconds.

The light streamed from an altar, and from candles above it set around
a figure of the Mother of God. In front knelt a priest, and behind him,
straggling back in the pews, a score or so of women, some children, and
a blue-coated French soldier or two. The priest's voice sounded thin
and low: neither could hear what he said; the congregation made rapid
responses regularly, but eliding the, to them, familiar words. There was,
then, the murmur of repeated prayer, like muffled knocking on a door, and
nothing more.

"Let's go," whispered Pennell at last.

They went out, and shut the door softly behind them. As they did so, some
other door was opened noisily and banged, while footsteps began to drag
slowly across the stone floor and up the aisle they had come down. The
new-comer subsided into a pew with a clatter on the boards, but the
murmured prayers went on unbroken.

Outside the street engulfed them. The same faces passed by. A street-car
banged and clattered up towards the centre of the town, packed with
jovial people. Pennell looked towards it half longingly. "Great Scott,
Graham! I wish, now, we hadn't come away so soon," he said.

CHAPTER VIII

The lower valley of the Seine is one of the most beautiful and
interesting river-stretches in Northern Europe. It was the High Street of
old Normandy, and feuda, barons and medieval monks have left their mark
upon it. From the castle of Tancarville to the abbey of Jumieges
you can read the story of their doings; or when you stand in the Roman
circus at Lillebonne, or enter the ancient cloister of M. Maeterlinck's
modern residence at St. Wandrille, see plainly enough the writing of a
still older legend, such as appeared, once, on the wall of a palace in
Babylon. On the left bank steep hills, originally wholly clothed with
forest and still thickly wooded, run down to the river with few breaks
in them, each break, however, being garrisoned by an ancient town. Of
these, Caudebec stands unrivalled. On the right bank the flat plain of
Normandy stretches to the sky-line, pink-and-white in spring with miles
of apple-orchards. The white clouds chase across its fair blue sky,
driven by the winds from the sea, and tall poplars rise in their uniform
rows along the river as if to guard a Paradise.

Caudebec can be reached from Le Havre in a few hours, and although cars
for hire and petrol were not abundant in France at the time,