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 her extraordinary, serious smile. "You, child, must never say that. I can, but you mustn't. Promise."

He had promised readily enough and run out of doors. But at supper he couldn't resist asking a question which had been tormenting him. "Why mustn't I say 'labyrinth,' Aunt Verona?" he had finally ventured. Aunt Verona had been puzzled a long while, then broke into one of her rare, kind laughs. "It was the other word, child, that Aunt Verona wished you not to say—the first word."

"Oh, 'God?

"Yes . . . Except in your prayers."

From Aunt Verona's change of expression he had known he mustn't pursue the subject, and alone in bed he had got himself involved in an intricate piece of casuistry, trying to define the legitimate use and vain misuse of the name of the Deity. Intricate, because it had all to be negotiated without implying that Aunt Verona was a breaker of the commandments. The dire consequences of taking the name of the Lord in vain were minutely known to him. Hell was redder and hotter than the coals over which Aunt Verona baked onions when he had a cold, and it was obvious that one's own aunt would not go to such a place when she died. Besides, he took it for granted that Aunt Verona had been "saved." It was certainly lucky that his mother had been saved before she entered that fatal sanatorium!

Mark Laval, who attended Mass in the heathenish church across the river where the French-Canadian lumberjacks lived, had told him that only Catholics got to heaven, and Paul had run home terrified at the thought that his mother might be baking like an onion, till Mr. Silva, who was chopping wood in the yard, had reassured him. Mr. Silva—whom the people of Hale's Turning called "Mr. Silver" unaware that Silva meant "woods"—said that the Catholics invented such stories in the hope