As he came out from the block of chairs, very upright and tall, with his biretta once more on his white hair, he saw an old woman watching him very closely.  He hesitated an instant, wondering whether she were a penitent, and as he hesitated she made a movement towards him.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” she began.

She was not a Catholic then.  He lifted his biretta.

“Can I do anything for you?” he asked.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but were you at Brighton, at the accident two months ago?”

“I was.”

“Ah!  I thought so:  my daughter-in-law saw you then.”

Percy had a spasm of impatience:  he was a little tired of being identified by his white hair and young face.

“Were you there, madam?”

She looked at him doubtfully and curiously, moving her old, eyes up and down his figure.  Then she recollected herself.

“No, sir; it was my daughter-in-law—­I beg your pardon, sir, but—–­”

“Well?” asked Percy, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice.

“Are you the Archbishop, sir?”

The priest smiled, showing his white teeth.

“No, madam; I am just a poor priest.  Dr. Cholmondeley is Archbishop.  I am Father Percy Franklin.”

She said nothing, but still looking at him made a little old-world movement of a bow; and Percy passed on to the dim, splendid chapel to pay his devotions.

III

There was great talk that night at dinner among the priests as to the extraordinary spread of Freemasonry.  It had been going on for many years now, and Catholics perfectly recognised its dangers, for the profession of Masonry had been for some centuries rendered incompatible with religion through the Church’s unswerving condemnation of it.  A man must choose between that and his faith.  Things had developed extraordinarily during the last century.  First there had been the organised assault upon the Church in France; and what Catholics had always suspected then became a certainty in the revelations of 1918, when P. Gerome, the Dominican and ex-Mason, had made his disclosures with regard to the Mark-Masons.  It had become evident then that Catholics had been right, and that Masonry, in its higher grades at least, had been responsible throughout the world for the strange movement against religion.  But he had died in his bed, and the public had been impressed by that fact.  Then came the splendid donations in France and Italy—­to hospitals, orphanages, and the like; and once more suspicion began to disappear.  After all, it seemed—­and continued to seem—­for seventy years and more that Masonry was nothing more than a vast philanthropical society.  Now once more men had their doubts.

“I hear that Felsenburgh is a Mason,” observed Monsignor Macintosh, the Cathedral Administrator.  “A Grand-Master or something.”

“But who is Felsenburgh?” put in a young priest.