And this quiet walk with the homely, good, little Félicité tranquillised and steadied her maddened nerves and brought reason to her mind.
Félicité left her basket in the vestibule of the church, and going in dipped her fingers into the holy water fountain and held her hand out to Brigit.
Unconsciously the girl touched it, and then, as the other woman turned and knelt at one of the worn praying-desks, Brigit hastily touched her own forehead and breast.
The drop of water stayed for some seconds on her forehead, and in its coolness seemed to burn her.
After a short pause she walked down the aisle and sat down in the second row of seats.
The priest came out as she took her place, and the Mass began.
Its very silence was restful to the girl, and as she watched, the sleep that had refused to come to her all through the night touched her eyelids and they closed wearily.
When she opened them it was as if a cool hand had been laid on her aching heart. Here was peace.
The Good Shepherd in the round window seemed to mean much as he looked down at her, and even the statue of the Mother and Child in the altar to her left looked beautiful to her. "Salve Regina, Mater Misericordiæ," she read.
To the right of the main altar a group of tiny votive candles were burning; an old nun in a kind of white sunbonnet, draped with a black gauze veil, dropped her rosary with a little clatter to the wooden floor.
There were only a dozen or so people in the church, but this made no difference. The priest would not feel slighted, as an Anglican curate might. He had a serious ascetic face, and seemed not to know that any was present beside his God and himself.
"I am a brute," Brigit told herself, "a perfect fiend to torture him so. Why cannot we be good to each other? And how will it all end? I will be good to him in the future."
Then she shivered, for she was not a child and realised perfectly that her "being good" to Joyselle was by no means altogether safe.
"It is playing with fire," she thought. "That is one reason why I _am_ so horrid, perhaps."
The priest had gone, and the little congregation, with last genuflections, were hurrying out of the church. Busy people, these; workers who before their day's labour begins have always time to say _Bonjour_ to their God.