h Father Curtis. His days were full days to the overbrimming,
and a fashionable pack was ever at his heels, fawning and shoving and
importuning. It was fashionable to adore Father Curtis, and for that
reason she shrank from venturing any demand upon his time, and nobody
else at Saint Berold's appealed to her. Besides, the music was hard,
commonplace, even blatant at times, and, having a delicate ear, she
shrank from this also. It is probable then that what comfort she found
under Saint Berold's big, brand-new Episcopal cross she extracted from
observing the rites, usages, and laws of a creed that had been accepted
for her by that Christian gentleman, Major Belwether. Also, she may have
found some solace from the still intervals devoted to an inventory of
her sins and the wistful searching of a heart too young for sadness. If
she did it was her own affair, not Grace Ferrall's, who went with her
to Saint Berold's determined always to confess to too much gambling, but
letting it go from day to day so that the penance could not interfere
with the next seance.

Agatha Caithness was there a great deal, looking like a saint in her
subdued plumage; and very devout, dodging nothing--neither confession
nor Quarrier's occasionally lifted eyes, though their gaze, meeting,
seemed lost in dreamy devotion or drowned in the contemplation of the
spiritual and remote.

Plank came docilely from his Dutch Reformed church to sit beside
Leila. As for Mortimer, once a vestryman, he never came at all--made no
pretence or profession of what he elegantly expressed as "caring a damn"
for anything "in the church line," though, he added, there were "some
good lookers to be found in a few synagogues." His misconception of the
attractions of the church amused the new set of men among whom he had
recently drifted, to the unfeigned disgust of gentlemen like Major
Belwether; "club" men, in the commoner and more sinister interpretation
of the word; unfit men, who had managed to slip into good clubs;
men, once fit, who had deteriorated to the verge of ostracism; heavy,
over-fed, idle, insolent men in questionable financial situation, hard
card players, hard drinkers, hard riders, negative in their virtues,
merciless in their vices, and whose cynical misconduct formed the
sources of the stock of stories told where such men foregather.

Mortimer had already furnished his world with sufficient material for
jests of that flavour; now they were telling a new