"Why do they call it the _messe des paresseux_?" The question must have been asked just as Sally looked at her watch because she saw the clock had stopped. But the nave of the Cathedral of Rheims was very unlike that of St. Satisfax as the bride and bridegroom lingered in out of the sunshine, and the former took the unwarrantable liberty, for a heretic, of crossing herself from the Holy Water at the foot of the column near the door. But she made up for it by the amount of _sous_ she gave to the old blind woman, who must have been knitting there since the days of Napoleon at least, if she began in her teens. "You haven't done it right, dearest. I knew you wouldn't. Look here." And Fenwick crosses himself _secundum artem_, dipping his finger first to make it valid. "But how came you to know?" His wife does not say this; she only thinks it. And how came he to know about the _messe des paresseux_? She repeats her question aloud. "Because the lazy people don't come to Mass till ten," he replies. They are talking under their breath, as English folk do in foreign churches, heedless of the loud gabble and resonant results of too much snuff on the part of ecclesiastics off duty. Their own salvation has been cultivated under a list slipper, cocoanut matting, secretive pew-opener policy; and if they are new to it all, they are shocked to see the snuff taken over the heads and wooden _sabots_ of the devout country-folk, whose ancestors knelt on the same hard stone centuries ago, and prayed for great harvests that never came, and to avert lean years that very often did. The Anglican cannot understand the real aboriginal Papist. Sally's mother was puzzled when she saw an old, old kneeling figure, toothless and parchment-skinned, on whose rosary a pinch of snuff _ut supra_ descended, shake it off the bead in evidence, and get on to the next _Ave_, even as one who has business before her--so many pounds of oakum to pick, so many bushels of peas to shell. It was a reality to her; and there was the Blessed Virgin herself, a visible certainty, who would see to the recognition of it at headquarters. Fenwick passed up the aisle, dreamily happy in the smell of the incense, beside his bride of yesterday's making--she intensely happy too, but in another way, for was not her bridegroom of yesterday her husband of twenty years ago--cruelly wrenched away, but her husband for all that. Still, there was always that little rift within the lute that made the music--pray Heaven not to widen! Always that thought!--that he might recollect. How could he remember the _messe des paresseux_, and keep his mind a blank about how he came to know of it? It was the first discomfort that had crossed her married mind--put it away!