ith its waxed floor, the hard, narrow pallet upon
which he slept, the blue and gold image of the Virgin, and the little
writing-pulpit upon which lay open a manuscript he was illuminating,
for he was very skilled in that art which already was falling into
desuetude.

At this pulpit, by the window, he took his seat, and signed to me to
kneel. I recited the Confiteor. Thereafter, with my face buried in my
hands, my soul writhing in an agony of penitence and shame, I poured out
the hideous tale of the evil I had wrought.

Rarely did he speak while I was at that recitation. Save when I halted
or hesitated he would interject a word of pity and of comfort that fell
like a blessed balsam upon my spiritual wounds and gave me strength to
pursue my awful story.

When I had done and he knew me to the full for the murderer and
adulterer that I was, there fell a long pause, during which I waited as
a felon awaits sentence. But it did not come. Instead, he set himself
to examine more closely the thing I had told him. He probed it with
a question here and a question there, and all of a shrewdness that
revealed the extent of his knowledge of humanity, and the infinite
compassion and gentleness that must be the inevitable fruits of such sad
knowledge.

He caused me to go back to the very day of my arrival at Fifanti's; and
thence, step by step, he led me again over the road that in the past
four months I had trodden, until he had traced the evil to its very
source, and could see the tiny spring that had formed the brook which,
gathering volume as it went, had swollen at last into a raging torrent
that had laid waste its narrow confines.

"Who that knows all that goes to the making of a sin shall dare to
condemn a sinner?" he cried at last, so that I looked up at him,
startled, and penetrated by a ray of hope and comfort. He returned my
glance with one of infinite pity.

"It is the woman here upon whom must fall the greater blame," said he.

But at that I cried out in hot remonstrance, adding that I had yet
another vileness to confess--for it was now that for the first time I
realized it. And I related to him how last night I had repudiated her,
cast her off and fled, leaving her to bear the punishment alone.

Of my conduct in that he withheld his criticism. "The sin is hers," he
repeated. "She was a wife, and the adultery is hers. More, she was the
seducer. It was she who debauched your mind with lascivious readings,
and tore