“The side aisle, Father Aubert?” she repeated in a puzzled way.
“Yes; come,” he said. “You will see.”
He led her down the aisle, and, halting before the cross, pointed upward.
“Why, the fastenings, all but one, are broken!” she cried out instantly. “It is a miracle that it has not fallen! What does it mean?”
“It is the story of last night, Mademoiselle Valerie,” he answered with a sober smile. “Sit down in the pew there, and I will tell you. I have sent Narcisse for a ladder, and we will repair the damage presently, but there will be time before he gets back. He believes that the fastenings have grown old and rotten, which is true; and that they parted simply from age, which is not quite so much the fact. I have allowed him to form his own conclusions; I have even encouraged him to believe in them.”
She was sitting in the pew now. The bewildered little pucker had grown deeper. She kept glancing back and forth from Raymond, standing before her in the aisle, to the broken fastenings of the cross high up on the wall.
“But that is what any one would naturally think,” she said slowly. “I thought so myself. I—I do not quite understand, Father Aubert.”
“I think you know,” said Raymond quietly, “that some nights I do not sleep very well, Mademoiselle Valerie. Last night was one of those. When midnight came I was still wakeful, and I had not gone to bed. I was very restless; I knew I could not sleep, and so I decided to go out for a little while.”
“Yes,” she said impulsively; “I know. I heard you.”
“You heard me?” He looked at her in quick surprise. “But I thought I had been very careful indeed to make no noise. I—I did not think that I had wakened———”