WHITEWASH
Gothic arches overhead. These men and women around her—were they not ghosts of those serfs of ancient days, unchanged in manner, dress, or speech? It was all old, unspeakably old, a mirage of what had disappeared over the horizon of memory.
The procession turned. Victoria, still in her dream, followed slowly. Where was she being led, she wondered vaguely; back to the tombs into which the ghostly multitude must descend and disappear until evoked again by the feast of souls or the intercession of St. Anne?
Into the vast reverberating depths of the church they poured once more, through its echoing aisles, past its blinding altar—out again through the connecting porches into the great cloisters of the monastery. In the centre of the lantern-lighted court a gigantic crucifix lifted its head, from which, with horrible realism, a life-size figure of Christ leaned, bleeding. Choir-boys in red and white swung censers to and fro.
The high, nasal tenor of a priest's voice intoned alone for a moment; then the responses broke from the multitude with the roar of breaking
