preceding Monseigneur C---- to the sacristy.

The kneeling nuns, roused from their devout abstraction, made their
reverence and went away. The fashionable lady, my neighbour, rose also,
with graceful reserve. As she departed her glance just flitted over my
face in disapproval.

Half dead, or so it seemed to me, yet intensely alive to every trifle, I
sat among the leisurely moving crowd, then rose too and went toward the
door.

I had slept through the sermon. Had I slept through the sermon? I looked
up and saw him passing along the gallery to his place. Only his side I
saw; the thin bent arm in its black covering looked like one of those
devilish, nameless instruments which lie in the disused torture-chambers
of mediaeval castles.

But I had escaped him, though his eyes had said I should not. _Had_
I escaped him? That which gave him the power over me came back out of
oblivion, where I had hoped to keep it. For I knew him now. Death and the
awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent
him--they had changed him for every other eye, but not for mine. I had
recognized him almost from the first; I had never doubted what he was
come to do; and now I knew while my body sat safe in the cheerful little
church, he had been hunting my soul in the Court of the Dragon.

I crept to the door: the organ broke out overhead with a blare. A
dazzling light filled the church, blotting the altar from my eyes. The
people faded away, the arches, the vaulted roof vanished. I raised my
seared eyes to the fathomless glare, and I saw the black stars hanging in