When she opened them it was as if a cool hand had been laid on her aching heart. Here was peace.
The Good Shepherd in the round window seemed to mean much as he looked down at her, and even the statue of the Mother and Child in the altar to her left looked beautiful to her. "Salve Regina, Mater Misericordiæ," she read.
To the right of the main altar a group of tiny votive candles were burning; an old nun in a kind of white sunbonnet, draped with a black gauze veil, dropped her rosary with a little clatter to the wooden floor.
There were only a dozen or so people in the church, but this made no difference. The priest would not feel slighted, as an Anglican curate might. He had a serious ascetic face, and seemed not to know that any was present beside his God and himself.
"I am a brute," Brigit told herself, "a perfect fiend to torture him so. Why cannot we be good to each other? And how will it all end? I will be good to him in the future."
Then she shivered, for she was not a child and realised perfectly that her "being good" to Joyselle was by no means altogether safe.
"It is playing with fire," she thought. "That is one reason why I am so horrid, perhaps."
The priest had gone, and the little congregation, with last genuflections, were hurrying out of the church. Busy people, these; workers who before their day's labour begins have always time to say Bonjour to their God.
"A beautiful church, hein?" asked Félicité, as they came out of the church. "You liked it, my daughter?"
"Yes. I liked it. Where do we go now, petite mère?"