However, when the plaster was all used up, she said no more about repairing the parsonage. The painting which the priest executed quite delighted her. It was the chief charm of the improvements. The Abbé, who had repaired the woodwork everywhere with bits of boards, took particular pleasure in spreading his big brush, dipped in bright yellow paint, over all this woodwork. The gentle, up-and-down motion of the brush lulled him, left him thoughtless for hours whilst he gazed on the oily streaks of paint. When everything was quite yellow, the pulpit, the confessional-box, the altar rails, even the clock-case itself, he ventured to try his hand at imitation marble work by way of touching up the high altar. Then, growing bolder, he painted it all over. Glistening with white and yellow and blue, it was pronounced superb. People who had not been to mass for fifty years streamed into the church to see it. And now the paint was dry. All that remained for Abbé Mouret to do was to edge the panels with brown beading. So, that afternoon, he set to work at it, wishing to get it done by evening; for on the following day, as he had reminded La Teuse, there would be high mass. She was there ready to arrange the altar. She had already placed on the credence the candlesticks and the silver cross, the porcelain vases filled with artificial roses, and the laced cloth which was only used on great festivals. The beading, however, proved so difficult of execution, that it was not completed till late in the evening. It was growing quite dark as the Abbé finished his last panel. ‘It will be really too beautiful,’ said a rough voice from amidst the greyish gloom of twilight which was filling the church. La Teuse, who had knelt down to get a better view of the Abbé’s brush as it glided along his rule, started with alarm. ‘Ah! it’s Brother Archangias,’ she said, turning round. ‘You came in by the sacristy then? You gave me quite a turn. Your voice seemed to sound from under the floor.’ Abbé Mouret had resumed his work, after greeting the Brother with a slight nod. The Brother remained standing there in silence, with his fat hands clasped in front of his cassock. Then, shrugging his shoulders, as he observed with what scrupulous care the priest sought to make his beading perfectly straight, he repeated: ‘It will be really too beautiful.’ La Teuse, who knelt near by in ecstasy, started again. ‘Dear me!’ she said, ‘I had quite forgotten you were there. You really ought to cough before you speak. You have a voice that comes on one so suddenly that one might think it was a voice from the grave.’ She rose up and drew back a little the better to admire the Abbé’s work. ‘Why too beautiful?’ she asked. ‘Nothing can be too beautiful when it is done for the Almighty. If his reverence had only had some gold, he would have done it with gold, I’m sure.’