e lazy people don't come to Mass till ten," he replies. They
are talking under their breath, as English folk do in foreign churches,
heedless of the loud gabble and resonant results of too much snuff
on the part of ecclesiastics off duty. Their own salvation has
been cultivated under a list slipper, cocoanut matting, secretive
pew-opener policy; and if they are new to it all, they are shocked to
see the snuff taken over the heads and wooden _sabots_ of the devout
country-folk, whose ancestors knelt on the same hard stone centuries
ago, and prayed for great harvests that never came, and to avert lean
years that very often did. The Anglican cannot understand the real
aboriginal Papist. Sally's mother was puzzled when she saw an old,
old kneeling figure, toothless and parchment-skinned, on whose rosary
a pinch of snuff _ut supra_ descended, shake it off the bead in
evidence, and get on to the next _Ave_, even as one who has business
before her--so many pounds of oakum to pick, so many bushels of peas
to shell. It was a reality to her; and there was the Blessed Virgin
herself, a visible certainty, who would see to the recognition of it
at headquarters.

Fenwick passed up the aisle, dreamily happy in the smell of the
incense, beside his bride of yesterday's making--she intensely happy
too, but in another way, for was not her bridegroom of yesterday her
husband of twenty years ago--cruelly wrenched away, but her husband for
all that. Still, there was always that little rift within the lute that
made the music--pray Heaven not to widen! Always that thought!--that he
might recollect. How could he remember the _messe des paresseux_, and
keep his mind a blank about how he came to know of it? It was the first
discomfort that had crossed her married mind--put it away!

It was easy to put it all away and forget it in the hush and gloom
of the great church, filled with the strange intonation from
Heaven-knows-where--some side-chapel unseen--of a Psalm it would have
puzzled David to be told was his, and a scented vapour Solomon would
have known at once; for neither myrrh nor frankincense have changed one
whit since his day. It was easy enough so long as both sat listening to
_Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax_. Carried _nem. con._ by all
sorts and conditions of Creeds. But when the little bobs and tokens and
skirt-adjustments of the fat priest and his handsome abettor (a young
fellow some girl might have been the wife of, with