"Why not?" demanded Louise. "It was most beautiful. I have never 'eard it better."
"Oh yes, it was," said Peter; "the music and singing were wonderful, but—forgive me if I hurt you, but I can't help saying it—I see now what our people mean when they say it is nothing less than idolatry."
"Idolatry?" queried Louise, stumblingly and bewildered. "But what do you mean?"
"Well," said Peter, "the Sacrament is, of course, a holy thing, a very holy thing, the sign and symbol of Christ Himself, but in that church sign and symbol were forgotten; the Sacrament was worshipped as if it were very God."
"Oui, oui," protested Louise vehemently, "It is. It is le bon Jesu. It is
He who is there. He passed by us among them all, as we read He went
through the crowds of Jerusalem in the holy Gospel. And there was not one
He did not see, either," she added, with a little break in her voice.
Peter all but stopped in the road. It was absurd that so simple a thing should have seemed to him new, but it is so with us all. We know in a way, but we do not understand, and then there comes the moment of illumination—sometimes.
"Jesus Himself!" he exclaimed, and broke off abruptly. He recalled a fragment of speech: "Not a dead man, not a man on the right hand of the throne of God." But "He can't be found," Langton had said. Was it so? He walked on in silence. What if Louise, with her pitiful story and her caged, earthy life, had after all found what the other had missed? He pulled himself together; it was too good to be true.
One day Louise asked him abruptly if he had been to see the girl in the house which he had visited with Pennell. He told her no, and she said—they had met by chance in the town—"Well, go you immediately, then, or you will not see her."
"What do you mean?" he asked. "Is she ill—dying?"
"Ah, non, not dying, but she is ill. They will take her to a 'ospital to-morrow. But this afternoon she will be in bed. She like to see you, I think."