r part of the face with its short
chin, the mouth rather drawn by two grave lines, gave it an expression
of suffering that was even a little morose. And here again, under the
immemorial name of Notre Dame de la belle Verriere, she held an infant
in a dress of raisin-purple, a child barely visible in the mixture of
dark hues all about it.

In short, She to whom all appealed was there; everywhere under the
forest roof of this cathedral the Virgin was present. She seemed to have
come from all the ends of the earth, under the semblance of every race
known in the Middle Ages: black as an African, tawny as a Mongolian,
pale coffee colour as a half-caste, and white as an European, thus
declaring that, as mediator for the whole human race, She was everything
to each, everything to all; and promising by the presence of Her Son,
whose features bore the character of each race, that the Messiah had
come to redeem all men without distinction.

And it seemed as though the sun, as it mounted higher, followed the
growth of the Virgin, taking its birth in the window where She was still
a babe in that northern transept where Saint Anne, her mother, of the
black face, sat between David, the king of the golden harp, and Solomon,
the bearer of the blue-lilied sceptre, each against a background of
purple, to prefigure the royal birth of the Son; between Melchizedec,
the mitred patriarch, holding the censer, and Aaron, in the curious red
cap bordered with lemon yellow, representing prophetically the
Priesthood of Christ.

And at the end of the apse, quite high up, there was another
Mary--triumphant, looking down the sacred grove, supported by figures
from the Old Testament and by Saint Peter. It was She again who in the
south transept faced Saint Anne, She, now a woman and herself a mother,
amid four enormous men bearing pick-a-back on their shoulders four
smaller figures; these were the four Greater Prophets who had foretold
the coming of the Messiah--Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel,
bearing the four Evangelists, and thus artlessly expressing the
parallelism of the Old and New Testaments, and the support given by the
Old Covenant to the New.

And then, as though Her presence were not fully ubiquitous, as though
She desired that, turn where they might, Her worshippers should ever see
Her, the Virgin was to be found on a smaller scale in less important
positions; enthroned in the centre of the shields, in the heart of the
great rose