way, a lonely cottage, with its
surrounding group of low, mop-head acacias, and the gaunt, straight arm
of a well pointing upwards to the sun.

And through the silent, vast immensity the little procession of village
folk, with banners flying and quaint, harsh voices singing the Litany,
winds its way along the flat, sandy road, like a brightly-coloured
ribbon thrown there by a giant hand, and made to flutter and to move by
a giant's breath.

Presently the shrine came in sight: just a dark speck at first in the
midst of the great loneliness, then more and more distinct--there on the
roadside--all by itself without a tree near it--lonely in the bosom of
the plain.

The procession came to a halt in front of it, and two hundred pairs of
eyes, brimful with simple faith and simple trust, gazed in reverence on
the naive wax figure behind the grating, within its throne of rough
stone and whitewash. It was dressed in blue calico spangled with tinsel,
and had a crown on its head made of gilt paper and a veil of coarse
tarlatan. Two china pots containing artificial flowers were placed on
either side of the little image.

It was all very crude, very rough, very naive, but a fervent,
unsophisticated imagination had endowed it with a beauty all the more
real, perhaps, because it only existed in the hearts of a handful of
ignorant children of the soil. It made Something seem real to them which
otherwise might have been difficult to grasp; and now when Pater
Bonifacius in his gentle, cracked voice intoned the invocations of the
Litany, the "Salus infirmorum" and "Refugium peccatorum" and, above all,
the "Consolatrix afflictorum" the response "Ora pro nobis" came from two
hundred trusting hearts--praying, if not for themselves, then for those
who were dear to them: the infirm, the sinner, the afflicted.

And among those two hundred hearts none felt the need for prayer more
than Andor and Elsa. They had left affliction behind them, they stood
upon the threshold of a new life--where happiness alone beckoned to
them, and sorrow and parting lay vanquished behind the gates of the
past. But in spite, or perhaps because, of this happiness which beckoned
so near now, there was a tinge of sadness in their hearts, that sadness
which always comes with joy once extreme youth has gone by . . . the
sadness which hovers over finite things, the sense of future which so
quickly becomes the past.

From where Andor stood, holding the dais above Pate