“Let’s walk to the house, Rod,” suggested Cis, when they came out of the station into Beaconhite’s main street.
“Let’s walk to the restaurant first of all!” Rodney amended her proposal. “I’ve no notion of being conveyed to the hospital on an ambulance call, perishing in the street from inanition!”
Accordingly they walked briskly toward the small hotel in a cross street, several blocks from the station, where, Rodney affirmed, “there was the most decent chef in Beaconhite.”
They came upon a block where there had been a fire; cordons were stretched across the sidewalk, into the road; within them a blackened mass of still smoking débris was all that was left of what that morning had been a block of small houses, each house divided into four- and five-room tenements at low rentals. Just as Cis and Rodney came up there emerged from the side street, evidently coming around from the rear of the burned block, a tall, thin figure in a long black coat; Cis instantly recognized Father Morley, and as quickly he recognized her, at least for one whom he had been seeing at the eight o’clock Mass. He possessed the natural gift of retaining faces in his memory, a gift heightened to the highest degree by the training of his Order, and his intense interest in the soul behind each face.
Cis, meeting his deep-set, keen, gentle eyes, bowed instinctively. The priest instantly returned the bow with a smile that lit up his ascetic face as if a light had been thrown upon it, but in this case the light came from within, outward.
The Jesuit stepped up to Cis’s side, taking it for granted that he was welcome.
“Good evening, my child,” he said, and his voice, which always thrilled Cis when he preached his five minutes’ sermon from the sanctuary, was still more moving heard in conversational tones at her elbow. She saw, too, that his face, thin, ascetic, worn, as she had seen it at the distance intervening between the church pews and the sanctuary, was more deeply graved with fine lines than she had seen; he looked like a man who had found life a serious matter, and whose bodily health was not the best.
“Good evening, Father Morley,” Cis replied.
“I do not know your name, but I know that you belong to me,” said Father Morley. “I am sure that I have not met you. I see you at my Mass, at eight o’clock. Have you been long in Beaconhite?”
“No, Father. I came early in the summer. My name is Cicely Adair; I am Mr. Lucas’ private secretary. You never have spoken to me before,” said Cis. “Father Morley, this is Mr. Rodney Moore.”