honneur de Saint Antoine de Padoue.” There was nothing to please the eye, nothing to appeal to the senses. There was not even the mystery which shrouds and softens, for the sunshine streamed in through the white glass of the windows, revealing, even emphasising, as if with deliberate cruelty, the cheap finery, the tarnished velvet, the crude colours, the meretricious gestures and poses of the plaster saints. Yet as Domini touched her forehead and breast with holy water, and knelt for a moment on the stone floor, she was conscious that this rather pitiful house of God moved her to an emotion she had not felt in the great and beautiful churches to which she was accustomed in England and on the Continent. Through the windows she saw the outlines of palm leaves vibrating in the breeze; African fingers, feeling, with a sort of fluttering suspicion, if not enmity, round the heart of this intruding religion, which had wandered hither from some distant place, and, stayed, confronting the burning glance of the desert. Bold, little, humble church! Domini knew that she would love it. But she did not know then how much. She wandered round slowly with a grave face. Yet now and then, as she stood by one of the plaster saints, she smiled. They were indeed strange offerings at the shrine of Him who held this Africa in the hollow of His hand, of Him who had ordered the pageant of the sun which she had seen last night among the mountains. And presently she and this little church in which she stood alone became pathetic in her thoughts, and even the religion which the one came to profess in the other pathetic too. For here, in Africa, she began to realise the wideness of the world, and that many things must surely seem to the Creator what these plaster saints seemed just then to her. “Oh, how little, how little!” she whispered to herself. “Let me be bigger! Oh, let me grow, and here, not only hereafter!” The church door creaked. She turned her head and saw the priest whom she had met in the tunnel entering. He came up to her at once, saluted her, and said: “I saw you from my window, Madame, and thought I would offer to show you our little church here. We are very proud of it.” Domini liked his voice and his naive remark. His face, too, though undistinguished, looked honest, kind, and pathetic, but with a pathos that was unaffected and quite unconscious. The lower part of it was hidden by a moustache and beard. “Thank you,” she answered. “I have been looking round already.” “You are a Catholic, Madame?” “Yes.” The priest looked pleased. There was something childlike in the mobility of his face. “I am glad,” he said simply. “We are not a rich community in Beni-Mora, but we have been fortunate in bygone years. Our great Cardinal, the Father of Africa, loved this place and cherished his children here.” “Cardinal Lavigerie?”