She took the child, hushed it in her arms for a moment, and then laid it upon a chair, where it went to sleep, peacefully like a cherub.  The church then subsided into solemn quietness, disturbed only by the chattering of the sparrows on the rowan tree outside.  At the altar, Vincent had carried the missal to the right again, and Abbe Mouret had just folded the corporal and slipped it within the burse.  He was now saying the concluding prayers with a solemn earnestness, which neither the screams of the baby nor the giggling of the three girls had been able to disturb.  He seemed to hear nothing of them, but to be wholly absorbed in the prayers which he was offering up to Heaven for the happiness of the pair whose union he had just blessed.  The sky that morning was grey with a hazy heat, which veiled the sun.  Through the broken windows a russet vapour streamed into the church, betokening a stormy day.  Along the walls the gaudily coloured pictures of the Stations of the Cross displayed their red, blue, and yellow patches; at the bottom of the nave the dry woodwork of the gallery creaked and strained; and under the doorway the tall grass by the steps thrust ripening straw, all alive with little brown grasshoppers.  The clock, in its wooden case, made a whirring noise, as though it were some consumptive trying to clear his throat, and then huskily struck half-past six.

‘Ite, missa est,’ said the priest, turning round to the congregation.

‘Deo gratias,’ responded Vincent.

Then, having kissed the altar, Abbe Mouret once more turned round, and murmured over the bent heads of the newly married pair the final benediction:  ‘Deus Abraham, Deus Isaac, et Deus Jacob vobiscum sit’ —­his voice dying away into a gentle whisper.

‘Now, he’s going to address them,’ said Babet to her friends.

‘He is very pale,’ observed Lisa.  ’He isn’t a bit like Monsieur Caffin, whose fat face always seemed to be on the laugh.  My little sister Rose says that she daren’t tell him anything when she goes to confess.’

‘All the same,’ murmured La Rousse, ’he’s not ugly.  His illness has aged him a little, but it seems to suit him.  He has bigger eyes, and lines at the corners of his mouth which make him look like a man.  Before he had the fever, he was too much like a girl.’

‘I believe he’s got some great trouble,’ said Babet.  ’He looks as though he were pining away.  His face is deadly pale, but how his eyes glitter!  When he drops his eyelids, it is just as though he were doing it to extinguish the fire in his eyes.’

La Teuse again shook her broom at them.  ‘Hush!’ she hissed out, so energetically that it seemed as if a blast of wind had burst into the church.

Meantime Abbe Mouret had collected himself, and he began, in a rather low voice: