Pan Stanislav looked on Marynia's face, lighted by the golden gleams. There was great calm in it and attention. It was evident that she was repeating the "Angelus" now, as she had repeated it in Kremen, when it was sounded in Vantory. Always and everywhere the same. Pan Stanislav remembered again the "service of God." It seemed to him more simple and pacifying than ever. But now, while approaching the city, he understood the permanence, the vitality, the immensity, of those beliefs. "All this," thought he, "has endured thus for a thousand and a half of years; and the strength and certainty of this city is only in those towers, those bells, that permanence of the cross, which endures and endures." Again Svirski's words came to him: "Here a ruin, on the Palatine a ruin, in the Forum a ruin, but over the city crosses, crosses, crosses and crosses." It seemed to him beyond a doubt that in that very permanence there is something superhuman. Meanwhile the bells sounded, and the heavens above the city were covered with twilight. Under the impression produced by the praying Marynia, and the bells, and that vesper feeling, which seemed to hover over the city and the whole land, the following thought began to take form in Pan Stanislav, who had much mental directness: "What an idiot and vain fool should I be, in view of the needs of faith and that feeling of God, were I to seek some special forms of love and reverence of my own, instead of accepting those which Marynia calls 'service of God,' and which still must be the best, since the world has lived nearly two thousand years in them!" Then the reasoning side of this thought struck him as a practical man, and he continued to himself, almost joyously: "On one side the traditions of a thousand years, the life of God knows how many generations and how many societies, for which there was and is delight in those forms, the authority for God knows how many persons who consider them as the only forms; on the other side, who? I, a partner in the commission house of Bigiel and Polanyetski; and I had the pretension to think out something better into which the Lord God would fit Himself more conveniently. For this it is needful at least to be a fool! I, besides, am a man sincere with myself; and I could not endure it if from time to time the thought came to me,--I am a fool. But my mother believed in this, and my wife believes; and I have never seen greater peace in any one than in them." Here he looked at Marynia once and a second time; she had finished evidently her "Angelus," for she smiled at him in answer, and inquired,-- "Why so silent?" "We are all silent," he answered.