Page:Burton Stevenson--The marathon mystery.djvu/121

Rh in a tiny glass before an image of the Virgin, which hung in a little chapelle against the wall. She made a genuflection and turned back to me. “Now I am ready,” she said, and tucked her hand confidingly under my arm.

“What is the light for, Cecily?” I asked, as we left the room.

“Oh,” she explained, “faut limé lampe ou pou fai la Vierge passé dans caïe-ou. Now the Virgin will watch over me while I am away. But you are a Protestant. You do not care for the Virgin.”

She looked up at me reproachfully, with a little sigh because I must be damned.

“But Tremaine—is he not also a Protestant?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” she answered, shaking her head. “Certainly not—not at all. He even at one time thought of becoming a priest.”

“A priest!” I repeated, astonished. Here was news, indeed, and I was so absorbed in it that I did not resent Higgins’s stare of astonishment as we went down together in the elevator. Tremaine a priest! Yet, why not? No doubt he would have made a most successful one—an ideal Jesuit, for example, rising to a high place.

“Then why did he not become one?” I questioned, when we were seated in our cab and bowling along toward Broadway. A sudden fever of eagerness to probe into Tremaine’s past took possession of me.

“I do not know,” she answered; then she looked at me with a sudden quizzical narrowing of the eyes. “Perhaps he found the vows of a repugnance.”