This sent Odo in a cheerful mood to the red-hung windows, whence, peering between the folds of his aunts’ gala habits, he admired the great court enclosed in nobly-ordered cloisters and strewn with fresh herbs and flowers.  Thence one of the rector’s chaplains conducted them to the church, placing them, in company with the monastery’s other noble guests, in a tribune constructed above the choir.  It was Odo’s first sight of a great religious ceremony, and as he looked down on the church glimmering with votive offerings and gold-fringed draperies, and seen through rolling incense in which the altar-candles swam like stars reflected in a river, he felt an almost sensual thrill of pleasure at the thought that his life was to be passed amid scenes of such mystic beauty.  The sweet singing of the choir raised his spirit to a higher view of the scene; and the sight of the huddled misery on the floor of the church revived in him the old longing for the Franciscan cowl.

From these raptures he was speedily diverted by the sight awaiting him at the conclusion of the mass.  Hardly had the spectators returned to the rector’s windows when, the doors of the church swinging open, a procession headed by the rector himself descended the steps and began to make the circuit of the court.  Odo’s eyes swam with the splendour of this burst of banners, images and jewelled reliquaries, surmounting the long train of tonsured heads and bathed in a light almost blinding after the mild penumbra of the church.  As the monks advanced, the pilgrims, pouring after them, filled the court with a dark undulating mass through which the procession wound like a ray of sunlight down the brown bosom of a torrent.  Branches of oleander swung in the air, devout cries hailed the approach of the Black Madonna’s canopy, and hoarse voices swelled to a roar the measured litanies of the friars.

The ceremonies over, Odo, with the canonesses, set out to visit the chapels studding the beech-knoll above the monastic buildings.  Passing out of Juvara’s great portico they stood a moment above the grassy common, which presented a scene in curious contrast to that they had just quitted.  Here refreshment-booths had been set up, musicians were fiddling, jugglers unrolling their carpets, dentists shouting out the merits of their panaceas, and light women drinking with the liveried servants of the nobility.  The very cripples who had groaned the loudest in church now rollicked with the mountebanks and dancers; and no trace remained of the celebration just concluded but the medals and relics strung about the necks of those engaged in these gross diversions.