The days passed on. Between Eleanor and Lucy there had grown up a close, intense, and yet most painful affection. Neither gave the other her full confidence, and on Eleanor's side the consciousness both of the futility and the enormity of what she had done only increased with time, embittering the resistance of a will which was still fierce and unbroken.

Meanwhile she often observed her companion with a quick and torturing curiosity. What was it that Manisty had found so irresistible, when all her own subtler arts had failed?

Lucy was in some ways very simple, primitive even, as Manisty had called her. Eleanor knew that her type was no longer common in a modern America that sends all its girls to college, and ransacks the world for an experience. But at the same time the depth and force of her nature promised rich developments in the future. She was still a daughter of New England, with many traits now fast disappearing; but for her, too, there was beginning that cosmopolitan transformation to which the women of her race lend themselves so readily.

And it was Manisty's influence that was at work! Eleanor's miserable eyes
discerned it in a hundred ways. Half the interests and questions on which
Manisty's mind had been fixed for so long were becoming familiar to Lucy.
They got books regularly from Rome, and Eleanor had been often puzzled by
Lucy's selections—till one day the key to them flashed across her.

The girl indeed was making her way, fast and silently, into quite new regions of thought and feeling. She read, and she thought. She observed the people of the village; she even frequented their humble church, though she would never go with Eleanor to Sunday Mass. There some deep, unconquerable instinct held her back.

All through, indeed, her personal beliefs and habits—Evangelical, unselfish, strong, and a little stern—seemed to be quite unchanged. But they were differently tinged, and would be in time differently presented. Nor would they ever, of themselves, divide her from Manisty. Eleanor saw that clearly enough. Lucy could hold opinion passionately, unreasonably even; but she was not of the sort that makes life depend upon opinion. Her true nature was large, tolerant, patient. The deepest forces in it were forces of feeling, and no intellectual difference would ever be able to deny them their natural outlet.

Meanwhile Lucy seemed to herself the most hopelessly backward and ignorant person, particularly in Eleanor's company.

'Oh! I am just a dunce,' she said one day to Eleanor, with a smile and sigh, after some questions as to her childhood and bringing up. 'They ought to have sent me to college. All the girls I knew went. But then Uncle Ben would have been quite alone. So I just had to get along.'

'But you know what many girls don't know.'

Lucy gave a shrug.

'I know some Latin and Greek, and other things that Uncle Ben could teach me. But oh! what a simpleton I used to feel in Boston!'

'You were behind the age?

Lucy laughed.

'I didn't seem to have anything to do with the age, or the age with me. You see, I was slow, and everybody else was quick. But an American that isn't quick's got no right to exist. You're bound to have heard the last thing, and read the last book, or people just want to know why you're there!'

'Why should people call you slow?' said Eleanor, in that voice which Lucy often found so difficult to understand, because of the strange note of hostility which, for no reason at all, would sometimes penetrate through the sweetness. 'It's absurd. How quickly you've picked up Italian—and frocks!—and a hundred things.'

She smiled, and stroked the brown head beside her.

Lucy coloured, bent over her work, and did not reply.

Generally they passed their mornings in the loggia reading and working. Lucy was a dexterous needle-woman, and a fine piece of embroidery had made much progress since their arrival at Torre Amiata. Secretly she wondered whether she was to finish it there. Eleanor now shrank from the least mention of change; and Lucy, having opened her generous arms to this burden, did not know when she would be allowed to put it down. She carried it, indeed, very tenderly—with a love that was half eager remorse. Still, before long Uncle Ben must remonstrate in earnest. And the Porters, whom she had treated so strangely? They were certainly going back to America in September, if not before. And must she not go with them?

And would the heat at Torre Amiata be bearable for the sensitive Northerner after July? Already they spent many hours of the day in their shuttered and closed rooms, and Eleanor was whiter than the convolvulus which covered the new-mown hayfields.

What a darling—what a kind and chivalrous darling was Uncle Ben! She had asked him to trust her, and he had done it nobly, though it was evident from his letters that he was anxious and disturbed. 'I cannot tell you everything,' she had written, 'or I should be betraying a confidence; but I am doing what I feel to be right—what I am sure you would consent to my doing if you knew. Mrs. Burgoyne is very frail—and she clings to me. I can't explain to you how or why—but so it is. For the present I must look after her. This place is beautiful; the heat not yet too great; and you shall hear every week. Only, please, tell other people that I wish you to forward letters, and cannot long be certain of my address.'

And he:

'Dear child, this is very mysterious. I don't like it. It would be absurd to pretend that I did. But I haven't trusted my Lucy for fourteen years in order to begin to persecute her now because she can't tell me a secret. Only I give you warning that if you don't write to me every week, my generosity, as you call it, will break down—and I shall be for sending out a search party right away…. Do you want money? I must say that I hope July will see the end of your adventure.'

Would it? Lucy found her mind full of anxious thoughts as Eleanor read aloud to her.

Presently she discovered that a skein of silk she wanted for her work was not in her basket. She turned to look also in her old inlaid workbox, which stood on a small table beside her. But it was not there.

'Please wait a moment,' she said to her companion. 'I am afraid I must get my silk.'

She stood up hastily, and her movement upset the rickety cane table. With a crash her workbox fell to the ground, and its contents rolled all over the loggia. She gave a cry of dismay.

'Oh! my terra-cottas!—my poor terra-cottas!'

Eleanor started, and rose too, involuntarily, to her feet. There on the ground lay all the little Nemi fragments which Manisty had given to Lucy, and which had been stowed away, each carefully wrapped in tissue paper, in the well of her old workbox.

Eleanor assisted to pick them up, rather silently. The note of keen distress in Lucy's voice rang in her ears.

'They are not much hurt, luckily,' she said.

And indeed, thanks to the tissue paper, there were only a few small chips and bruises to bemoan when Lucy at last had gathered them all safely into her lap. Still, chips and bruises in the case of delicate GrÆco-Roman terra-cottas are more than enough to make their owner smart, and Lucy bent over them with a very flushed and rueful face, examining and wrapping them up again.

'Cotton-wool would be better,' she said anxiously. 'How have you put your two away?'

Directly the words were out of her mouth she felt that they had been better unspoken.

A deep flush stained Eleanor's thin face.

'I am afraid I haven't taken much care of them,' she said hurriedly.

They were both silent for a little. But while Lucy still had her lap full of her treasures, Eleanor again stood up.

'I will go in and rest for an hour before dÉjeuner. I think I might go to sleep.'

She had passed a very broken night, and Lucy looked at her with tender concern. She quickly but carefully laid aside her terra-cottas, that she might go in with Eleanor and 'settle her' comfortably.

But when she was left to rest in her carefully darkened room, and Lucy had gone back to the loggia, Eleanor got no wink of sleep. She lay in an anguish of memory, living over again that last night at the villa—thinking of Manisty in the dark garden and her own ungovernable impulse.

Presently a slight sound reached her from the loggia. She turned her head quickly. A sob?—from Lucy?

Her heart stood still. Noiselessly she slipped to her feet. The door between her and the loggia had been left ajar for air. It was partially glazed, with shutters of plain green wood outside, and inside a muslin blind. Eleanor approached it.

Through the chink of the door she saw Lucy plainly. The girl had been sitting almost with her back to the door, but she had turned so that her profile and hands were visible.

How quiet she was! Yet never was there an attitude more eloquent. She held in her hands, which lay upon her knee, one of the little terra-cottas. Eleanor could see it perfectly. It was the head of a statuette, not unlike her own which she had destroyed,—a smaller and ruder Artemis with the Cybele crown. There flashed into her mind the memory of Manisty explaining it to the girl, sitting on the bench behind the strawberry hut; his black brows bent in the eagerness of his talk; her sweet eyes, her pure pleasure.

And now Lucy had no companion—but thought. Her face was raised, the eyes were shut, the beautiful mouth quivered in the effort to be still. She was mistress of herself, yet not for the moment wholly mistress of longing and of sorrow. A quick struggle passed over the face. There was another slight sob. Then Eleanor saw her raise the terra-cotta, bow her face upon it, press it long and lingeringly to her lips. It was like a gesture of eternal farewell; the gesture of a child expressing the heart of a woman.

Eleanor tottered back. She sat on the edge of her bed, motionless in the darkness, till the sounds of Cecco bringing up the pranzo in the corridor outside warned her that her time of solitude was over.

* * * * *

In the evening Eleanor was sitting in the Sassetto. Lucy with her young need of exercise had set off to walk down through the wood to the first bridge over the Paglia. Eleanor had been very weary all day, and for the first time irritable. It was almost with a secret relief that Lucy started, and Eleanor saw her depart.

Mrs. Burgoyne was left stretched on her long canvas chair, in the green shade of the Sassetto. All about her was a chaos of moss-grown rocks crowned with trees young and old; a gap in the branches showed her a distant peachy sky suffused with gold above the ethereal heights of the Amiata range; a little wind crept through the trees; the birds were silent, but the large green lizards slipped in and out, and made a friendly life in the cool shadowed place.

The Contessa was to have joined Eleanor here at six o'clock. But a note had arrived excusing her. The visit of some relations detained her.

Nevertheless a little after six a step was heard approaching along the winding path which while it was still distant Eleanor knew to be Father Benecke. For his sake, she was glad that the Contessa was not with her.

As for Donna Teresa, when she met the priest in the village or on the road she shrank out of his path as though his mere shadow brought malediction.

Her pinched face, her thin figure seemed to contract still further under an impulse of fear and repulsion. Eleanor had seen it, and wondered.

But even the Contessa would have nothing to say to him.

'Non, Madame; c'est plus fort que moi!' she had said to Eleanor one day that she had come across Mrs. Burgoyne and Father Benecke together in the Sassetto—in after-excuse for her behaviour to him. 'For you and me—bien entendu!—we think what we please. Heaven knows I am not bigoted. Teresa makes herself unhappy about me.' The stout, imperious woman stifled a sigh that betrayed much. 'I take what I want from our religion—and I don't trouble about the rest. Emilio was the same. But a priest that disobeys—that deserts—! No! that is another matter. I can't argue; it seizes me by the throat.' She made an expressive movement. 'It is an instinct—an inheritance—call it what you like. But I feel like Teresa; I could run at the sight of him.'

Certainly Father Benecke gave her no occasion to run. Since his recovery from the first shock and agitation of his suspension he had moved about the roads and tracks of Torre Amiata with the 'recollected' dignity of the pale and meditative recluse. He asked nothing; he spoke to no one, except to the ladies at the convent, and to the old woman who served him unwillingly in the little tumble-down house by the river's edge to which he had now transferred himself and his books, for greater solitude. Eleanor understood that he shrank from facing his German life and friends again till he had completed the revision of his book, and the evolution of his thought; and she had some reason to believe that he regarded his isolation and the enmity of this Italian neighbourhood as a necessary trial and testing, to be borne without a murmur.

As his step came nearer, she sat up and threw off her languor. It might have been divined, even, that she heard it with a secret excitement.

When he appeared he greeted her with the manner at once reticent and cordial that was natural to him. He had brought her an article in a German newspaper of the 'Centre' on himself and his case, the violence of which had provoked him to a reply, whereof the manuscript was also in his pocket.

Eleanor took the article and turned it over. But some inward voice told her that her rÔle, of counsellor and critic was—again—played out. Suddenly Father Benecke said:

'I have submitted my reply to Mr. Manisty. I would like to show you what he says.'

Eleanor fell back in her chair. 'You know where he is?' she cried.

Her surprise was so great that she could not at once disguise her emotion. Father Benecke was also taken aback. He lifted his eyes from the papers he held.

'I wrote to him through his bankers the other day, Madame. I have always found that letters so addressed to him are forwarded.'

Then he stopped in distress and perturbation. Mrs. Burgoyne was still apparently struggling for breath and composure. His absent, seer's eyes at last took note of her as a human being. He understood, all at once, that he had before him a woman very ill, apparently very unhappy, and that what he had just said had thrown her into an anguish with which her physical weakness was hardly able to cope.

The colour rose in his own cheeks.

'Madame! let me hasten to say that I have done your bidding precisely.
You were so good as to tell me that you wished no information to be given
to anyone as to your stay here. I have not breathed a word of it to Mr.
Manisty or to any other of my correspondents. Let me show you his letter.'

He held it out to her. Eleanor took it with uncertain fingers.

'Your mention of him took me by surprise,' she said, after a moment. 'Miss
Foster and I—have been—so long—without hearing of our friends.'

Then she stooped over the letter. It seemed to her the ink was hardly dry on it—that it was still warm from Manisty's hand. The date of it was only three days old. And the place from which it came? Cosenza?—Cosenza in Calabria? Then he was still in Italy?

She put the letter back into Father Benecke's hands.

'Would you read it for me? I have rather a headache to-day.'

He read it with a somewhat embarrassed voice. She lay listening, with her eyes closed under her large hat, each hand trying to prevent the trembling of the other.

A strange pride swelled in her. It was a kind and manly letter, expressing far more personal sympathy with Benecke than Manisty had ever yet allowed himself—a letter wholly creditable indeed to the writer, and marked with a free and flowing beauty of phrase that brought home to Eleanor at every turn his voice, his movements, the ideas and sympathies of the writer.

Towards the end came the familiar Manisty-ism:

'All the same, their answer to you is still as good as ever. The system must either break up or go on. They naturally prefer that it should go on. But if it is worked by men like you, it cannot go on. Their instinct never wavers; and it is a true one.'

Then:

'I don't know how I have managed to write this letter—poor stuff as it is. My mind at this moment is busy neither with speculation nor politics. I am perched for the night on the side of a mountain thickly covered with beech woods, in a remote Calabrian hamlet, where however last year some pushing person built a small 'health resort,' to which a few visitors come from Naples and even from Rome. The woods are vast, the people savage. The brigands are gone, or going; of electric light there is plenty. I came this morning, and shall be gone to-morrow. I am a pilgrim on the face of Italy. For six weeks I have wandered like this, from the Northern Abruzzi downwards. Wherever holiday folk go to escape from the heat of the plains, I go. But my object is not theirs…. Nor is it yours, Padre. There are many quests in the world. Mine is one of the oldest that man knows. My heart pursues it, untired. And in the end I shall win to my goal.'

The old priest read the last paragraph in a hurried, unsteady voice. At every sentence he became aware of some electrical effect upon the delicate frame and face beside him; but he read on—not knowing how to save himself—lest she should think that he had omitted anything.

When he dropped the letter his hands, too, shook. There was a silence.

Slowly Eleanor dragged herself higher in her chair; she pushed her hat back from her forehead; she turned her white drawn face upon the priest.

'Father,' she said, bending towards him, 'you are a priest—and a confessor?'

His face changed. He waited an instant before replying.

'Yes, Madame—I am!' he said at last, with a firm and passionate dignity.

'Yet now you cannot act as a priest. And I am not a Catholic. Still, I am a human being—with a soul, I suppose—if there are such things!—and you are old enough to be my father, and have had great experience. I am in trouble—and probably dying. Will you hear my case—as though it were a confession—under the same seal?'

She fixed her eyes upon him. Insensibly the priest's expression had changed; the priestly caution, the priestly instinct had returned. He looked at her steadily and compassionately.

'Is there no one, Madame, to whom you might more profitably make this confession—no one who has more claim to it than I?'

'No one.'

'I cannot refuse,' he said, uneasily. 'I cannot refuse to hear anyone in trouble and—if I can—to help them. But let me remind you that this could not be in any sense a true confession. It could only be a conversation between friends.'

She drew her hand across her eyes.

'I must treat it as a confession, or I cannot speak. I shall not ask you to absolve me. That—that would do me no good,' she said, with a little wild laugh, 'What I want is direction—from some one accustomed to look at people as they are—and—and to speak the truth to them. Say "yes," Padre. You—you may have the fate of three lives in your hands.'

Her entreating eyes hung upon him. His consideration took a few moments longer. Then he dropped his own look upon the ground, and clasped his hands.

'Say, my daughter, all that you wish to say.'

The priestly phrase gave her courage.

She drew a long breath, and paused a little to collect her thoughts. When she began, it was in a low, dragging voice full of effort.

'What I want to know, Father, is—how far one may fight—how far one should fight—for oneself. The facts are these. I will not mention any names. Last winter, Father, I had reason to think that life had changed for me—after many years of unhappiness. I gave my whole, whole heart away.' The words came out in a gasp, as though a large part of the physical power of the speaker escaped with them. 'I thought that—in return—I was held in high value, in true affection—that—that my friend cared for me more than for anyone else—that in time he would be mine altogether. It was a great hope, you understand—I don't put it at more. But I had done much to deserve his kindness—he owed me a great deal. Not, I mean, for the miserable work I had done for him; but for all the love, the thought by day and night that I had given him.'

She bowed her head on her hands for a moment. The priest sat motionless and she resumed, torn and excited by her strange task.

'I was not alone in thinking and hoping—as I did. Other people thought it. It was not merely presumptuous or foolish on my part. But—ah! it is an old story, Padre. I don't know why I inflict it on you!'

She stopped, wringing her hands.

The priest did not raise his eyes, but sat quietly—in an attitude a little cold and stern, which seemed to rebuke her agitation. She composed herself, and resumed:

'There was of course some one else, Father—you understood that from the beginning—some one younger, and far more attractive than I. It took five weeks—hardly so much. There was no affinity of nature and mind to go upon—or I thought so. It seemed to me all done in a moment by a beautiful face. I could not be expected to bear it—to resign myself at once to the loss of everything that made life worth living—could I, Father?' she said passionately.

The priest still did not look up.

'You resisted?' he said.

'I resisted—successfully,' she said with fluttering breath. 'I separated them. The girl who supplanted me was most tender, dear, and good. She pitied me, and I worked upon her pity. I took her away from—from my friend. And why should I not? Why are we called upon perpetually to give up—give up? It seemed to me such a cruel, cold, un-human creed. I knew my own life was broken—beyond mending; but I couldn't bear the unkindness—I couldn't forgive the injury—I couldn't—couldn't! I took her away; and my power is still great enough, and will be always great enough, if I choose, to part these two from each other!'

Her hands were on her breast, as though she were trying to still the heart that threatened to silence her. When she spoke of giving up, her voice had taken a note of scorn, almost of hatred, that brought a momentary furrow to the priest's brow.

For a little while after she had ceased to speak he sat bowed, and apparently deep in thought. When he looked up she braced herself, as though she already felt the shock of judgment. But he only asked a question.

'Your girl-friend, Madame—her happiness was not involved?'

Eleanor shrank and turned away.

'I thought not—at first.' It was a mere murmur.

'But now?'

'I don't know—I suspect,' she said miserably. 'But, Father, if it were so she is young; she has all her powers and chances before her. What would kill me would only—anticipate—for her—a day that must come. She is born to be loved.'

Again she let him see her face, convulsed by the effort for composure, the eyes shining with large tears. It was like the pleading of a wilful child.

A veil descended also on the pure intense gaze of the priest, yet he bent it steadily upon her.

'Madame—God has done you a great honour.'

The words were just breathed, but they did not falter. Mutely, with parted lips, she seemed to search for his meaning.

'There are very few of whom God condescends to ask, as plainly, as generously, as He now asks of you. What does it matter, Madame, whether God speaks to us amid the thorns or the flowers? But I do not remember that He ever spoke among the flowers, but often—often, amongst deserts and wildernesses. And when He speaks—Madame! the condescension, the gift is that He should speak at all; that He, our Maker and Lord, should plead with, should as it were humble Himself to, our souls. Oh! how we should hasten to answer, how we should hurry to throw ourselves and all that we have into His hands!'

Eleanor turned away. Unconsciously she began to strip the moss from a tree beside her. The tears dropped upon her lap.

But the appeal was to religious emotion, not to the moral judgment, and she rallied her forces.

'You speak, Father, as a priest—as a Christian. I understand of course that that is the Christian language, the Christian point of view.'

'My daughter,' he said simply, 'I can speak no other language.'

There was a pause. Then he resumed: 'But consider it for a moment from another point of view. You say that for yourself you have renounced the expectation of happiness. What, then, do you desire? Merely the pain, the humiliation of others? But is that an end that any man or woman may lawfully pursue—Pagan or Christian? It was not a Christian who said, "Men exist for the sake of one another." Yet when two other human beings—your friends—have innocently—unwittingly—done you a wrong—'

She shook her head silently.

The priest observed her.

'One at least, you said, was kind and good—showed you a compassionate spirit—and intended you no harm. Yet you will punish her—for the sake of your own pride. And she is young. You who are older, and better able to control passion, ought you not to feel towards her as a tender elder sister—a mother—rather than a rival?'

He spoke with a calm and even power, the protesting force of his own soul mounting all the time like a tide.

Eleanor rose again in revolt.

'It is no use,' she said despairingly. 'Do you understand, Father, what I said to you at first?—that I have probably not many months—a year perhaps—to live? And that to give these two to each other would embitter all my last days and hours—would make it impossible for me to believe, to hope, anything?'

'No, no, poor soul!' he said, deeply moved. 'It would be with you as with St. John: "Now we know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren."'

She shrugged her shoulders.

'I have no faith—and no hope.'

His look kindled, took a new aspect almost of command.

'You do yourself wrong. Could you have brought yourself to ask this counsel of me, if God had not been already at work in your soul—if your sin were not already half conquered?'

She recoiled as though from a blow. Her cheek burnt.

'Sin!' she repeated bitterly, with a kind of scorn, not able to bear the word.

But he did not quail.

'All selfish desire is sin—desire that defies God and wills the hurt of man. But you will cast it out. The travail is already begun in you that will form the Christ.'

'Father, creeds and dogmas mean nothing to me!'

'Perhaps,' he said calmly. 'Does religion also mean nothing to you?'

'Oh! I am a weak woman,' she said with a quivering lip. 'I throw myself on all that promises consolation. When I see the nuns from down below pass up and down this road, I often think that theirs is the only way out; that the Catholic Church and a convent are perhaps the solution to which I must come—for the little while that remains.'

'In other words,' he said after a pause, 'God offers you one discipline, and you would choose another. Well, the Lord gave the choice to David of what rod he would be scourged with; but it always has seemed to me that the choice was an added punishment. I would not have chosen. I would have left all to His Divine Majesty! This cross is not of your own making; it comes to you from God. Is it not the most signal proof of His love? He asks of you what only the strongest can bear; gives you just time to serve Him with the best. As I said before, is it not His way of honouring His creature?'

Eleanor sat without speaking, her delicate head drooping.

'And, Madame,' the priest continued with a changed voice, 'you say that creeds and dogmas mean nothing to you. How can I, who am now cast out from the Visible Church, uphold them to you—attempt to bind them on your conscience? But one thing I can do, whether as man or priest; I can bid you ask yourself whether in truth Christ means nothing to you—and Calvary nothing?'

He paused, staring at her with his bright and yet unseeing eyes, the wave of feeling rising within him to a force and power born of recent storm, of the personal wrestling with a personal anguish.

'Why is it'—he resumed, each word low and pleading,—'that this divine figure is enshrined, if not in all our affections—at least in all our imaginations? Why is it that at the heart of this modern world, with all its love of gold, its thirst for knowledge, its desire for pleasure, there still lives and burns '—

—He held out his two strong clenched hands, quivering, as though he held in them the vibrating heart of man—

—'this strange madness of sacrifice, this foolishness of the Cross? Why is it that in these polite and civilised races which lead the world, while creeds and Churches divide us, what still touches us most deeply, what still binds us together most surely, is this story of a hideous death, which the spectators said was voluntary—which the innocent Victim embraced with joy as the ransom of His brethren—from which those who saw it received in very truth the communication of a new life—a life, a Divine Mystery, renewed amongst us now, day after day, in thousands of human beings? What does it mean, Madame? Ask yourself! How has our world of lust and iron produced such a thing? How, except as the clue to the world's secret, is man to explain it to himself? Ah! my daughter, think what you will of the nature and dignity of the Crucified—but turn your eyes to the Cross! Trouble yourself with no creeds—I speak this to your weakness—but sink yourself in the story of the Passion and its work upon the world! Then bring it to bear upon your own case. There is in you a root of evil mind—an angry desire—a cupido which keeps you from God. Lay it down before the Crucified, and rejoice—rejoice!—that you have something to give to your God—before He gives you Himself!'

The old man's voice sank and trembled.

Eleanor made no reply. Her capacity for emotion was suddenly exhausted.
Nerve and brain were tired out.

After a minute or two she rose to her feet and held out her hand.

'I thank you with all my heart. Your words touch me very much, but they seem to me somehow remote—impossible. Let me think of them. I am not strong enough to talk more now.'

She bade him good-night, and left him. With her feeble step she slowly mounted the Sassetto path, and it was some little time before her slender form and white dress disappeared among the trees.

Father Benecke remained alone—a prey to many conflicting currents of thought.

* * * * *

For him too the hour had been strangely troubling and revolutionary. On the recognised lines of Catholic confession and direction, all that had been asked of him would have been easy to give. As it was, he had been obliged to deal with the moral emergency as he best could; by methods which, now that the crisis was over, filled him with a sudden load of scrupulous anguish.

The support of a great system had been withdrawn from him. He still felt himself neither man nor priest—wavering in the dark.

This poor woman! He was conscious that her statement of her case had roused in him a kind of anger; so passionate and unblushing had been the egotism of her manner. Even after his long experience he felt in it something monstrous. Had he been tender, patient enough?

What troubled him was this consciousness of the woman, as apart from the penitent, which had overtaken him; the woman with her frail physical health, possibly her terror of death, her broken heart. New perplexities and compunctions, not to be felt within the strong dykes of Catholic practice, rushed upon him as he sat thinking under the falling night. The human fate became more bewildering, more torturing. The clear landscape of Catholic thought upon which he had once looked out was wrapping itself in clouds, falling into new aspects and relations. How marvellous are the chances of human history! The outward ministry had been withdrawn; in its stead this purely spiritual ministry had been offered to him. 'Domine, in cÆlo misericordia tua—judicia tua abyssus multa!'

* * * * *

Recalling what he knew of Mrs. Burgoyne's history and of Manisty's, his mind trained in the subtleties of moral divination soon reconstructed the whole story. Clearly the American lady now staying with Mrs. Burgoyne—who had showed towards himself such a young and graceful pity—was the other woman.

He felt instinctively that Mrs. Burgoyne would approach him again, coldly as she had parted from him. She had betrayed to him all the sick confusion of soul that existed beneath her intellectual competence and vigour. The situation between them, indeed, had radically changed. He laid aside deference and humility; he took up the natural mastery of the priest as the moral expert. She had no faith; and faith would save her. She was wandering in darkness, making shipwreck of herself and others. And she had appealed to him. With an extraordinary eagerness the old man threw himself into the task she had so strangely set him. He longed to conquer and heal her; to bring her to faith, to sacrifice, to God. The mingled innocence and despotism of his nature were both concerned. And was there something else?—the eagerness of the soldier who retrieves disobedience by some special and arduous service? To be allowed to attempt it is a grace; to succeed in it is pardon.

Was she dying—poor lady!—or was it a delusion on her part, one of the devices of self-pity? Yet he recalled the emaciated face and form, the cough, the trailing step, Miss Foster's anxiety, some comments overheard in the village.—

And if she died unreconciled, unhappy? Could nothing be done to help her, from outside,—to brace her to action—and in time?

He pondered the matter with all the keenness of the casuist, all the naÏvetÉ of the recluse. In the tragical uprooting of established habit through which he was passing, even those ways of thinking and acting which become the second nature of the priest were somewhat shaken. Had Eleanor's confidence been given him in Catholic confession he might not even by word or look have ever reminded herself of what had passed between them; still less have acted upon it in any way. Nor under the weight of tradition which binds the Catholic priest, would he ever have been conscious of the remotest temptation to what his Church regards as one of the deadliest of sins.

And further. If as his penitent, yet outside confession,—in a letter or conversation—Eleanor had told him her story, his passionately scrupulous sense of the priestly function would have bound him precisely in the same way. Here, all Catholic opinion would not have agreed with him; but his own conviction would have been clear.

But now in the general shifting of his life from the standpoint of authority, to the standpoint of conscience, new aspects of the case appeared to him. He recalled certain questions of moral theology, with which as a student he was familiar. The modern discipline of the confessional 'seal' is generally more stringent than that of the middle ages. Benecke remembered that in the view of St. Thomas, it is sometimes lawful for a confessor to take account of what he hears in confession so far as to endeavour afterwards to remove some obstacle to the spiritual progress of his penitent, which has been revealed to him under the seal. The modern theologian denies altogether the legitimacy of such an act, which for him is a violation of the Sacrament.

But for Benecke, at this moment, the tender argument of St. Thomas suddenly attained a new beauty and compulsion.

He considered it long. He thought of Manisty, his friend, to whom his affectionate heart owed a debt of gratitude, wandering about Italy, in a blind quest of the girl who had been snatched away from him. He thought of the girl herself, and the love that not all Mrs. Burgoyne's jealous anguish had been able to deny. And then his mind returned to Mrs. Burgoyne, and the arid misery of her struggle.—

The darkness was falling. As he reached the last of the many windings of the road, he saw his tiny house by the riverside, with a light in the window.

He leant upon his stick, conscious of inward excitement, feeling suddenly on his old shoulders the burden of those three lives of which Mrs. Burgoyne had spoken.

'My God, give them to me!'—he cried, with a sudden leap of the heart that was at once humble and audacious. Not a word to Mr. Manisty, or to any other human being, clearly, as to Mrs. Burgoyne's presence at Torre Amiata. To that he was bound.

But—

'May I not entertain a wayfarer, a guest?'—he thought, trembling, 'like any other solitary?'