“Were you there, madam?”
She looked at him doubtfully and curiously, moving her old, eyes up and down his figure. Then she recollected herself.
“No, sir; it was my daughter-in-law—I beg your pardon, sir, but—-”
“Well?” asked Percy, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice.
“Are you the Archbishop, sir?”
The priest smiled, showing his white teeth.
“No, madam; I am just a poor priest. Dr. Cholmondeley is Archbishop. I am Father Percy Franklin.”
She said nothing, but still looking at him made a little old-world movement of a bow; and Percy passed on to the dim, splendid chapel to pay his devotions.
III
There was great talk that night at dinner among the priests as to the extraordinary spread of Freemasonry. It had been going on for many years now, and Catholics perfectly recognised its dangers, for the profession of Masonry had been for some centuries rendered incompatible with religion through the Church’s unswerving condemnation of it. A man must choose between that and his faith. Things had developed extraordinarily during the last century. First there had been the organised assault upon the Church in France; and what Catholics had always suspected then became a certainty in the revelations of 1918, when P. Gerome, the Dominican and ex-Mason, had made his disclosures with regard to the Mark-Masons. It had become evident then that Catholics had been right, and that Masonry, in its higher grades at least, had been responsible throughout the world for the strange movement against religion. But he had died in his bed, and the public had been impressed by that fact. Then came the splendid donations in France and Italy—to hospitals, orphanages, and the like; and once more suspicion began to disappear. After all, it seemed—and continued to seem—for seventy years and more that Masonry was nothing more than a vast philanthropical society. Now once more men had their doubts.