ale light of
early morn. The sun, as yet, was only level with the tiled roof. The
_Kyrie Eleisons_ rang quiveringly through that sort of whitewashed
stable with flat ceiling and bedaubed beams. On either side three lofty
windows of plain glass, most of them cracked or smashed, let in a raw
light of chalky crudeness.

The free air poured in as it listed, emphasising the naked poverty of
the God of that forlorn village. At the far end of the church, above
the big door which was never opened and the threshold of which was
green with weeds, a boarded gallery--reached by a common miller's
ladder--stretched from wall to wall. Dire were its creakings on festival
days beneath the weight of wooden shoes. Near the ladder stood the
confessional, with warped panels, painted a lemon yellow. Facing it,
beside the little door, stood the font--a former holy-water stoup
resting on a stonework pedestal. To the right and to the left, halfway
down the church, two narrow altars stood against the wall, surrounded
by wooden balustrades. On the left-hand one, dedicated to the Blessed
Virgin, was a large gilded plaster statue of the Mother of God, wearing
a regal gold crown upon her chestnut hair; while on her left arm sat
the Divine Child, nude and smiling, whose little hand raised the
star-spangled orb of the universe. The Virgin's feet were poised on
clouds, and beneath them peeped the heads of winged cherubs. Then the
right-hand altar, used for the masses for the dead, was surmounted by a
crucifix of painted papier-mache--a pendant, as it were, to the Virgin's
effigy. The figure of Christ, as large as a child of ten years old,
showed Him in all the horror of His death-throes, with head thrown back,
ribs projecting, abdomen hollowed in, and limbs distorted and splashed
with blood. There was a pulpit, too--a square box reached by a five-step
block--near a clock with running weights, in a walnut case, whose thuds
shook the whole church like the beatings of some huge heart concealed,
it might be, under the stone flags. All along the nave the fourteen
Stations of the Cross, fourteen coarsely coloured prints in narrow black
frames, bespeckled the staring whiteness of the walls with the yellow,
blue, and scarlet of scenes from the Passion.

'_Deo Gratias_,' stuttered out Vincent at the end of the Epistle.

The mystery of love, the immolation of the Holy Victim, was about
to begin. The server took the Missal and bore it to the left, or
Gospel-si