ges, the painted figures, the robes, the whole mysterious
paraphernalia."

"Yes ... but when there isn't anything going on. You feel an influence. I
remember going into a church in San Antonio once--a Protestant chapel, and
the only thing I could recall afterward was a Yankee clock that ticked too
fast and too loud. I never heard of anything so horribly inappropriate.
Time was what you thought of. Not eternity. You felt that the people would
be afraid of wasting a minute too much--as if their real concerns were
elsewhere."

Harboro was instinctively combating the thought that was in her mind, so
far as there was a definite thought, and as far as he understood it. "But
why shouldn't there be a clock?" he asked. "If people feel that they ought
to give a certain length of time to worship, and then go back to their
work again, why shouldn't they have a clock?"

"I suppose it's all right," she conceded; and then, with a faint smile:
"Yes, if it didn't tick too loud."

She lowered her voice abruptly on the last word. They had passed across
the doorless portal and were in the presence of a group of silent,
kneeling figures: wretched women whose heads were covered with black
cotton _rebozos_, who knelt and faced the distant altar. They weren't in
rows. They had settled down just anywhere. And there were men: swarthy,
ill-shapen, dejected. Their lips moved noiselessly.

Harboro observed her a little uneasily. Her sympathy for this sort of
thing was new to him. But she made none of the customary signs of
fellowship, and after a brief interval she turned and led the way back
into the sunshine.

He was still regarding her strangely when she paused, just outside the
door, and opened a little hand-bag which depended from her arm. She was
quite intently devoted to a search for something. Presently she produced a
coin, and then Harboro observed for the first time that the tortured
figure of a beggar sat in the sun outside the church door.

Sylvia leaned over with an impassive face and dropped the coin into the
beggar's cup.

She chanced to glance at Harboro's face an instant later, and she was
dismayed a little by its expression: that of an almost violent distaste.
What did it mean? Was it because she had given a coin to the beggar? There
could have been no other reason. But why should he look as if her action
had contaminated her in some fashion--as if there had been communication
between her and the unfortunate _anciano_? As