ted his biretta.

"Can I do anything for you?" he asked.

"I beg your pardon, sir, but were you at Brighton, at the accident two
months ago?"

"I was."

"Ah! I thought so: my daughter-in-law saw you then."

Percy had a spasm of impatience: he was a little tired of being
identified by his white hair and young face.

"Were you there, madam?"

She looked at him doubtfully and curiously, moving her old, eyes up and
down his figure. Then she recollected herself.

"No, sir; it was my daughter-in-law--I beg your pardon, sir, but---"

"Well?" asked Percy, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice.

"Are you the Archbishop, sir?"

The priest smiled, showing his white teeth.

"No, madam; I am just a poor priest. Dr. Cholmondeley is Archbishop. I
am Father Percy Franklin."

She said nothing, but still looking at him made a little old-world
movement of a bow; and Percy passed on to the dim, splendid chapel to
pay his devotions.

III

There was great talk that night at dinner among the priests as to the
extraordinary spread of Freemasonry. It had been going on for many years
now, and Catholics perfectly recognised its dangers, for the profession
of Masonry had been for some centuries rendered incompatible with
religion through the Church's unswerving condemnation of it. A man must
choose between that and his faith. Things had developed extraordinarily
during the last century. First there had been the organised assault upon
the Church in France; and what Catholics had always suspected then
became a certainty in the revelations of 1918, when P. Gerome, the
Dominican and ex-Mason, had made his disclosures with regard to the
Mark-Masons. It had become evident then that Catholics had been right,
and that Masonry, in its higher grades at least, had been responsible
throughout the world for the strange movement against religion. But he
had died in his bed, and the public had been impressed by that fact.
Then came the splendid donations in France and Italy--to hospitals,
orphanages, and the like; and once more suspicion began to disappear.
After all, it seemed--and continued to seem--for seventy years and more
that Masonry was nothing more than a vast philanthropical society. Now
once more men had their doubts.

"I hear that Felsenburgh is a Mason," observed Monsignor Macintosh, the
Cathedral Administrator. "A Grand-Master or something."

"But who is Felsenburgh?" put in a young priest.

Monsignor pursed his