Before she had any realizing sense of time, the church had filled again for high mass. Then the lighting of the great white altar fascinated her, and she felt an intense desire to live again through such a moment of assurance as she had lately experienced--to hear that bell ring again, to smell the incense, and to believe that in some wonderful, wonderful way it was all a part of that prayer of hers that Heaven was bound to answer. So she stayed on, in her far-away pew, to the remotest corner of which she was crowded as the enormous church filled to its capacity. With the entrance of the preacher into the pulpit, though, she was conscious of a distinct "let-down." She had never liked sermons; they dealt with things so formally. Even when the priests made their greatest efforts to be plain-spoken and understandable, she seldom got any personal help from their discourse. They were prone to denunciations of adultery and drunkenness and other sins of which she was innocent, and to vague exhortations looking toward a hereafter on which her imagination had never taken any but the feeblest hold. But what was this priest saying? Something about a little household that the Lord had loved, and one of its two sisters had gone astray! The woman sitting next to Mary nudged her other neighbor and glanced in the direction of Mary's face, thrust forward as if so as not to lose a syllable, the tears chasing each other unheeded down its furrows. In her lap Mary's gnarled hands were clasped in painful intensity. Over and over, since she was a tiny child in Ireland, she had heard this Catholic rendering, of Mary of Bethany's story, but it had never meant anything to her. To-day it meant everything. [Illustration: "MARY SAT UNHEEDED AND UNHEEDING IN HER DIM CORNER, HER MIND GRAPPLING WITH THE STUPENDOUS IDEA"] "An' I said I niver wanted t' see her ag'in if she'd disgraaced me," she told herself, and was appalled at the remembrance. That afternoon, toward the early dusk, she sat in the dark kitchen holding Annie in her lap; all the other children were out. Casey, who had not left the house all day, was huddled up to the stove, smoking his rank pipe; he was unshaven and unwashed, and wore a coarse undershirt of a peculiar mustard color which lent his pallid, grime-streaked face a ghastly hue. He had been talking about a "gran' job" of which a man had told him, and building large castles about moving to a better street and a better house and buying a "parlie suit be aisy paymints." Mary listened believingly; twenty years of listening to these dreams which never came true had not killed her hopefulness. As she listened, though, her hopes outran Casey's, for she could conceive no possible felicity without Angela Ann. How to introduce the now-forbidden subject of Angela was a problem, but clearly the only way was to plunge in.