Immediately the Communion was ended an old peasant began to intone a hymn. The congregation sang the verses after him in subdued voices, and repeated the antiphons twice out loud. The hymn was primitive and monotonous, old as the earliest prayers of man uttered in forests where as yet scarcely man dwelt, old and monotonous as the breaking of waves on a solitary shore; yet that low singing around her sufficed to bring Agnes' thoughts back, as though she had been rushing breathless by night through some primeval forest and had suddenly emerged upon the seashore, amidst sandhills covered with sweet flowers and golden in the light of dawn.
Something stirred in the very depths of her being, a strange emotion gripped her throat; she felt the world turning round with her as though she had been walking head downwards and now resumed her natural position.
It was her past and the past of all her race that surged up and took hold of her, with the singing of the women and the old men, with the voices of her nurse and her servants, the
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