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scene going on in the little church of dusk! And somewhere wars!
    â€œWell,” to conclude, “you know your sin—You’ll have to keep your patience the next time—Keep well your idea, that you hurt his heart if not his body”—admiringly—“you’ve understood it yourself. I am certain,” he takes trouble to add in spite of an overburdened afternoon of work in there, “that the Lord understands you.—And, there is something else you want to tell me.”
    â€œYes my father”—and this Gerard says feeling like a beast piling animality on animality,—“I—er—” he stammers, confuses, and blushes, and stops.
    â€œI’m waiting, my little boy.”
    Quickly Gerard whispers him the news about the urinal, Saturday Afternoon Confessions in St. All’s had never heard a lurider admission it would seem from the stealth of his ps-ps’es.
    â€œAh, and did you touch his little dingdong?” ( Sa tite gidigne ).
    Gerard: “ Aw non !” glad he has a loophole and all because he never thought of it, mayhap—
    â€œWell,” sighing, “I have confidence in you my child that you’ll never do it again. And something else? anything else?”
    Gerard instantly remembers still another sin, forgotten until then—“I told the Sister I had studied my Catechism, and no I hadnt studied it.”
    â€œAnd you didnt know it?”
    â€œYes I knew it, but from another time, I remembered.”
    (“Ah, that’s no sin,” thinks the Priest) and closes up accounts with: “Very well, that’s all? Well then, say your rosary and fifteen Hail Mary’s.”
    â€œYes my father.”
    The gracious slide door slides, Gerard is facing the good happy wood, he runs out and hurries lightfoot to the altar, fit to sing—
    It’s all over! It was nothing! He’s pure again!
    He prays and bathes in prayers of gratitude at the white rail near the blood red carpet that runs to the stainless altar of white-and-gold, he clasps little hands over leaned elbows with hallelujahs in his eyes—To be God, and to’ve seen his eyes, looking up at my altar, with that beholding bliss, all because of some easy remission of mine, were hells of guilt I’d say—But God is merciful and God above all is kind, and kind is kind, and kindness is all, and it all works out that the mortal angel at the altar rail as the church hour roars with empty silence (everybody gone now, including the last priest, Gerard’s priest) is bathed in blisskindness whether it would be pointed out or not that other easier ways might do the job as well, which may be doubtful, snow being snow, divinity divinity, holiness holiness, believing believing.
    All alone at the rail he suddenly becomes conscious of the intense roaring of the silence, it fills his every ear and seems to permeate throughout the marble and the flowers and the darkening flickering air with the same pure hush transparency—The heaven heard sound for sure, hard as a diamond, empty as a diamond, bright as a diamond—Like unceasing compassion its continual near-at-hand sea-wash and solace, some subtle solace intended to teach some subtler reward than the one we’ve printed and that for which the architects raised.
    Enveloped in peaceful joy, my little brother hurries out the empty church and goes running and skampering home to supper thru raw marched streets.
    â€œDid you go to your confession, Lil Gerard?”
    â€œ Oui .”
    â€œCome eat, my golden angel, my pitou , my lil Mama’s cabbage.”
    I’m sitting stupidly at a bed-end in a dark room realizing my Gerard is home, my mouth’s been open in awe an hour you might think the way it’s sorta slobbered and run down my cheeks, I look down to discover my hands upturned and loose on my knees, the utter disjointed inexistence of my bliss.
    Me too I’d been hearing the