The women’s faces, hard in texture and rubicund as beef and good ale could make them, leaned silent a moment high above the dim pavement.  St. Bat’s little bell struck the three quarters before ten; lightly, delicately, with always a promise of the great booming which should follow on the stroke of the hour.  Its perfection of sound contrasted with the smithy clangor of metal in process of welding.  A butcher’s boy made his way through the front entrance toward a staircase, his feet echoing on the flags, carrying exposed a joint of beef on the board upon his head.

“And how do your foreigners behave themselves, Mrs. Blake?” inquired the neighbor.

“Like French emmy-grays, to be sure.  I told Blake when he would have them to lodge in the house, that we are a respectable family.  But he is master, and their lordships has money in their purses.”

“French lordships!” exclaimed the neighbor.  “Whether they calls themselves counts or markises, what’s their nobility worth?  Nothing!”

“The Markis de Ferrier,” retorted Mrs. Blake, nettled by a liberty taken with her lodgers which she reserved for herself, “is a gentleman if he is an emmy-gray, and French.  Blake may be master in his own house, but he knows landed gentry from tinkers—­whether they ever comes to their land again or not.”

“Well, then,” soothed her gossip, “I was only thinking of them French that comes over, glad to teach their betters, or even to work with their hands for a crust.”

“Still,” said Mrs. Blake, again giving rein to her prejudices, “I shall be glad to see all French papists out of St. Bat’s.  For what does scripture say?—­’Touch not the unclean thing!’ And that servant-body, instead of looking after her little missus, galloping out of the close on some bloody errand!”

“You ought to be thankful, Mrs. Blake, to have her out of the way, instead of around our children, poisoning their hinfant minds!  Thank God they are playing in the church lane like little Christians, safe from even that lad and lass yonder!”

A yell of fighting from the little Christians mingled with their hoots at choir boys gathering for the ten o’clock service in St. Bat’s.  When Mrs. Blake and her friend saw this preparation, they withdrew their dissenting heads from the arcades in order not to countenance what might go on below.

Minute followed minute, and the little bell struck the four quarters.  Then the great bell boomed out ten;—­the bell which had given signal for lighting the funeral piles of many a martyr, on Smithfield, directly opposite the church.  Organ music pealed; choir boys appeared from their robing-room beside the entrance, pacing two and two as they chanted.  The celebrant stood in his place at the altar, and antiphonal music rolled among the arches; pierced by the dagger voice of a woman in the arcades, who called after the retreating butcher’s boy to look sharp, and bring her the joint she ordered.