After his tiny sermon, delivered in French, and repeated in English, he hesitated a moment before turning to the Altar and said, with emotion in his mobile face and quick utterance:
"I have to ask a favour of you this morning. It is that at the Commemoration of the Departed you will unite with me in a mental act of prayer. Prayer for the soul of one to whom the gift of Faith, not being sought, was not given. A soul that has passed forth in darkness into the presence of Him who is the Light."
He turned away and began the Credo. As the deep chorus of male voices followed, Patrine found herself agreeing with the preacher's discourse.
"What was it," she asked herself, "that led me out from overheated, crowded rooms, oppressive with the scent of flowers and perfumes of triple extract—where the Tango and the Turkey Trot were being danced by half-clad, painted women and effeminate young men—and set my feet upon a mountain-slope with the free winds of heaven blowing upon me? I must answer—It was the War!"
As the great waves of the Credo surged and beat against the old brown rafters she went on thinking:
"What has made me quicken to the call of Humanity—awakened me to the knowledge of my sisterhood with my fellow-women? What has taught me how to live without dissipation and do without useless luxuries? Again—the War! And oh! what has taught me the meaning of Love in all its fulness, and set within the shrine of my heart this great sacred sorrow, and kindled in my soul the pure altar-flame of Faith? The War, the terrible War!"
She prayed for Sherbrand at the Commemoration of the Living! A somewhat incoherent petition that her Flying Man might be helped to bear his blindness, and find some happiness in her unchanged love. And the thought of the dead Agnostic haunted her. Who was the man, and what had brought about his ending? Was he a patient in the Ursuline Hospital?
A French, an English, or a German soldier? By a subtle change in her mental purview, recollections of von Herrnung began to occupy her mind.
"I will not think of him!—I will not!" she said to herself desperately. Then the obsession assumed an acute form. All that she most wished to forget in her relations with the Kaiser's Flying Man was being revived in her memory. Scene by scene, sentence by sentence, she was forced to live over the hated Past again.
She must have risen from her knees and left the chapel, so unbearable became the torment, but that the sacring bell rang its triples, the deep tones of the Sanctus answered from the turret, and the Host was lifted up. Then her tense nerves relaxed. The almost tangible presence of evil withdrew itself. She breathed more freely, and peace flowed in balmy waves upon her stormy soul. In prayer for herself and those who were most dear to her, she lost the sense of the unseen hands plucking at her garments and the soundless voice whispering at her ear. And presently at the Ipsis Domine, when supplication is made by priests and people for the departed, she prayed for the soul of the Denier—that the Divine Mercy might reach and enfold him, and lead him yet into the Way of Peace.