She wandered round slowly with a grave face.  Yet now and then, as she stood by one of the plaster saints, she smiled.  They were indeed strange offerings at the shrine of Him who held this Africa in the hollow of His hand, of Him who had ordered the pageant of the sun which she had seen last night among the mountains.  And presently she and this little church in which she stood alone became pathetic in her thoughts, and even the religion which the one came to profess in the other pathetic too.  For here, in Africa, she began to realise the wideness of the world, and that many things must surely seem to the Creator what these plaster saints seemed just then to her.

“Oh, how little, how little!” she whispered to herself.  “Let me be bigger!  Oh, let me grow, and here, not only hereafter!”

The church door creaked.  She turned her head and saw the priest whom she had met in the tunnel entering.  He came up to her at once, saluted her, and said: 

“I saw you from my window, Madame, and thought I would offer to show you our little church here.  We are very proud of it.”

Domini liked his voice and his naive remark.  His face, too, though undistinguished, looked honest, kind, and pathetic, but with a pathos that was unaffected and quite unconscious.  The lower part of it was hidden by a moustache and beard.

“Thank you,” she answered.  “I have been looking round already.”

“You are a Catholic, Madame?”

“Yes.”

The priest looked pleased.  There was something childlike in the mobility of his face.

“I am glad,” he said simply.  “We are not a rich community in Beni-Mora, but we have been fortunate in bygone years.  Our great Cardinal, the Father of Africa, loved this place and cherished his children here.”

“Cardinal Lavigerie?”

“Yes, Madame.  His house is now a native hospital.  His statue faces the beginning of the great desert road, But we remember him and his spirit is still among us.”

The priest’s eyes lit up as he spoke.  The almost tragic expression of his face changed to one of enthusiasm.

“He loved Africa, I believe,” Domini said.

“His heart was here.  And what he did!  I was to have been one of his freres armes, but my health prevented, and afterwards the association was dissolved.”

The sad expression returned to his face.

“There are many temptations in such a land and climate as this,” he said.  “And men are weak.  But there are still the White Fathers whom he founded.  Glorious men.  They carry the Cross into the wildest places of the world.  The most fanatical Arabs respect the White Marabouts.”

“You wish you were with them?”

“Yes, Madame.  But my health only permits me to be a humble parish priest here.  Not all who desire to enter the most severe life can do so.  If it were otherwise I should long since have been a monk.  The Cardinal himself showed me that my duty lay in other paths.”