The tenor was recalled. Colette Colin succeeded him. She sang "_Notre Petite Compagnon_" and "_La Buveuse d’Absinthe_" to the accompaniment of a pale, lean, red-nosed man with a profile grotesque as ever adorned a comic poster; who touched the piano-keys as though they were made of butter; and had a way of sucking in his steep upper-lip and cocking his eye at the star as he waited on her famous efforts, that made Patrine shake with suppressed laughter on her green iron chair. The last ironic line of Rollinat’s ballad, marvellously uttered rather than sung, died out upon a stillness. A storm of approval broke. Men and women stood up applauding in their places, and the singer came back, to sigh out the bitter-sweet lyric of Jammes, "_Le Parle de Dieu_." Then, while her name still tossed on the surges of human emotion, backwards and forwards under the electrics, Colette Colin, the pet of Paris, the eclipser of the famous Thérésa, was gone. Something of the yearning anguish of Jammes, who sees Religion as a dusty collection of ancient myths and folk-tales; to whom Faith is mere superstition, but who would give his all to be able to pray once more as in childhood, had given the girl lumps in the throat as she listened to Colette Colin. Though, unlike the sad, Agnostic poet, Patrine had no tender, sentimental memories in connection with a mother’s knee. Not from Mildred Saxham had she learned her first childish prayer, but from a procession of nurses; beginning with "Now I Lay Me Down" and "Gentle Jesus," instilled by Hannah, a Church of England woman, continuing with the Lord’s Prayer, insisted on by Susan, a Presbyterian; culminating in the "Our Father" "learned the childer" by Norah the Irish Catholic, a petition which—minus the final line—was just the same as the Lord’s Prayer. Also the Creed in English, and a surreptitious "Hail Mary" which brought about the sudden exit of Norah from the domestic scene. For teaching Patrine and Irma about God and Heaven and all that, was sufficiently interfering, said Mrs. Saxham, but when it came to Popery, _rank Popery_, it was time the woman went. So Norah ceased to be, from the point of view of the little Saxhams—and He who had risen above the horizon of childish intelligence, a Being vaguely realised as all-powerful and awful, great and beneficent, stern and tender, sank and vanished at the same time. But the Idea of Him remained to be merged in the personality of the child Patrine’s dada. Dada, so handsome and jolly, and nearly always kind to his rough little romping Pat. The boy, Patrine’s senior by sixteen months, had died in infancy. Captain Saxham was always gloomy on the deceased David’s birthday. Mildred reserved a nervous headache of the worst for the anniversary, the kind that is accompanied by temper and tears.