He left the door ajar--I knew him in some way for the door-keeper, deserting his post; and in a moment I was in the church and face to face with a sight I shall remember while I live; for that which was passing outside, that which I had seen during the last few minutes, gave it a solemnity exceeding even that of the strange service I had witnessed there before. The sun shut out, a few red altar lamps shed a sombre light on the pillars and the dim pictures and the vanishing spaces; above all, on a vast crowd of kneeling women, whose bowed heads and wailing voices as they chanted the Litany of the Virgin, filled the nave. There were some, principally on the fringe of the assembly, who rocked themselves to and fro, weeping silently, or lay still as statues with their foreheads pressed to the cold stones; whilst others glanced this way and that with staring eyes, and started at the slightest sound, and moaned prayers with white lips. But more and more, the passionate utterance of the braver souls laid bonds on the others; louder and louder the measured rhythm of "_Ora pro nobis! Ora pro nobis!_" rose and swelled through the vaults of the roof; more and more fervent it grew, more and more importunate, wilder the abandonment of supplication, until--until I felt the tears rise in my throat, and my breast swell with pity and admiration--and then I saw Denise. She knelt between her mother and Madame Catinot, nearly in the front row of those who faced the high altar. Whence I stood, I had a side view of her face as she looked upward in rapt adoration--that face which I had once deemed so childish. Now at the thought that she prayed, perhaps for me--at the thought that this woman so pure and brave, that though little more than a child, and soft, and gentle, and maidenly, she could bear herself with no shadow of quailing in this stress of death--at the thought that she loved me, and prayed for me, I felt myself more or less than a man. I felt tears rising, I felt my breast heaving, and then--and then as I went to drop on my knees, against the great doors on the farther side of the church, came a thunderous shock, followed by a shower of blows and loud cries for admittance.