s through his hair. "Forgive me, dear," he muttered. "I think I am
mad to-night, but I am not drunk, as you thought, except with worrying.
I feel lost, unclean, body and soul, and I thought you would help me to
forget--no, more than that, help me to feel a man. Can't you, won't you?"
he demanded, looking up. "I am tired of play-acting. I've a body, like
other men. Let me plunge down deep to-night, Louise. It will do me good,
and it doesn't matter. That girl was right after all. Oh, what a fool I
am!"

Then did the girl of the streets set out to play her chosen part. She did
not preach at all--how could she? Besides, neither had she any use for
the Ten Commandments. But if ever Magdalene broke an alabaster-box of
very precious ointment, Louise did so that night. She was worldly wise,
and she did not disdain to use her wisdom. And when he had gone she got
calmly into bed, and slept--not all at once, it is true, but as
resolutely as she had laughed and talked. It was only when she woke in
the morning that she found her pillow wet with tears.

It was a few days later that Louise took Peter to church. His ignorance
of her religion greatly amused her, or so at least she pretended, and
when he asked her to come out of town to lunch one morning, and she
refused because it was Corpus Christi, and she wanted to go to the sung
Mass, it was he who suggested that he should go with her. She looked at
him queerly a moment, and then agreed. They met outside the church and
went in together, as strange a pair as ever the meshes of that ancient
net which gathers of all kinds had ever drawn towards the shore.

Louise led him to a central seat, and found the place for him in her
Prayer-Book. The building was full, and Peter glanced about him
curiously. The detachment of the worshippers impressed him immensely.
There did not appear to be any proscribed procedure among them, and even
when the Mass began he was one of the few who stood and knelt as the
rubrics of the service directed. Louise made no attempt to do so. For the
most part she knelt, and her beads trickled ceaselessly through her
fingers.

Peter was, if anything, bored by the Mass, though he would not admit it
to himself. It struck him as being a ratherly poorly played performance.
True, the officiating ministers moved and spoke with a calm regularity
which impressed him, familiar as he was with clergymen who gave out hymns
and notices, and with his own solicitude at home that t