There was no office in his church that evening, but he lingered about it, touching this thing and the other with tender fingers. There was always a sweet scent in the little place: its door usually stood open to the fields amidst which it was planted, and the smell of the incense which century after century had been burned in it blended with the fragrance from primroses, or dog-roses, or new-mown hay, or crushed ripe grapes, which, according to the season, came in it from without. Candida kept it very clean, and the scorpions and spiders were left so little peace there by her everactive broom that they betook themselves elsewhere, dear as the wooden benches and the crannied stones had been to them for ages. Since he had come to Marca nothing of any kind had happened in it. There had been some marriages, a great many births, not a few burials; but that was all. The people who came to confession at Easter confessed very common sins: they had stolen this or that, cheated here, there, and everywhere, got drunk and quarrelled, nothing more: he would give them clean bills of spiritual health, and bid them go in peace and sin no more, quite sure, as they were sure themselves, that they would have the self-same sins to tell off next time they came there. Everybody in Marca thought a great deal of their religion; that is, they trusted to it in a helpless but confident kind of way as a fetich which, being duly and carefully propitiated, would make things all right for them after death. They would not have missed a mass to save their lives: that they dozed through it, and cracked nuts or took a suck at their pipe-stems when they woke, did not affect their awed and unchangeable belief in its miraculous and saving powers. If they had been asked what they believed, or why they believed, they would have scratched their heads and felt puzzled. Their minds dwelt in a twilight in which nothing had any distinct form. The clearest idea ever presented to them was that of the Madonna: they thought of her as of some universal mother who wanted to do them good in present and future if they only observed her ceremonials: just as in the ages gone by upon these same hill-sides the Latin peasant had thought of the great Demeter.