But he did not even enter the grounds, passing them with a heavy sigh for the happiness that had been sacrificed there; and then he took his way to the little village where St. John’s chapel stood, and where that sacrilegious fraud had been perpetrated.
And there he made a startling discovery!
It was nearly sunset when he reached the chapel, and as he lifted his hat on entering the sacred place, still thinking of his mother, who believed herself a happy bride when her feet had crossed its threshold, the last notes of a sweet hymn died away on the organ within.
He crossed the vestibule, and was about opening the inner door, when a lady came down from the organ loft and met him face to face.
She was about twenty-five or six years of age, with a very sweet and lovely though sad face, and she bowed kindly and graciously to the stranger.
He returned the salutation, and then asked if she would tell him where he could find the sexton.
She pointed out to him a little cottage near by, and as he started to go toward it, she turned and walked with him, remarking the beauty of the day and the glorious sunset, which they could see through the overarching trees that grew about the chapel.
More than once he found himself searching her sweet face, and there was something in her manner and in the tones of her voice which made him wonder it at some time in her life she, too, had not suffered deeply.
“Perhaps,” he thought, “there is another tale of wrong, and misery, and disappointment connected with her life.”
They walked together as far as the sexton’s house, she passing in to speak to the wife, while he sought the man who was working in the garden.