error-stricken when, looking through the aperture, I saw she was fainting;
and I heard the noise of her body falling upon the floor, and of her head
striking against the sides of the confessional-box.

Quick as lightning, I ran to help her, took her in my arms, and called a
couple of men, who were at a little distance, to assist me in laying her on
a bench. I washed her face with some cold water and vinegar. She was as
pale as death, but her lips were moving, and she was saying something which
nobody but I could understand,--

"I am lost--lost for ever!"

We took her to her disconsolate family, where, during a month, she lingered
between life and death.

Her two first confessors came to visit her: but, having asked every one to
go out of the room, she politely but absolutely requested them to go away
and never come again. She asked me to visit her everyday, "for," she said,
"I have only a few more days to live. Help me to prepare myself for the
solemn hour which will open to me the gates of eternity!"

Every day I visited her, and I prayed and I wept with her.

Many times, with tears, I requested her, when alone, to finish her
confession; but, with a firmness which then seemed to me mysterious and
inexplicable, she politely rebuked me.

One day when, alone with her, I was kneeling by the side of her bed to
pray, I was unable to articulate a single word, because of the
inexpressible anguish of my soul on her account; she asked me, "Dear
Father, why do you weep?"

I answered, "How can you put such a question to your murderer? I weep
because I have killed you, dear friend."

This answer seemed to trouble her exceedingly. She was very weak that day.
After she had wept and prayed in silence, she said, "Do not weep for me,
but weep for so many priests who destroy their penitents in the
confessional. I believe in the holiness of the sacrament of penitence,
since our holy Church has established it. But there is, somewhere,
something exceedingly wrong in the confessional. Twice I have been
destroyed, and I know many girls who have also been destroyed by the
confessional. This is a secret, but will that secret be kept for ever? I
pity the poor priests the day that our fathers will know what becomes of
the purity of their daughters in the hands of their confessors. Father
would surely kill my two last confessors, if he could know how they have
destroyed his poor child."

I could not answer except by weeping.

We remai