oul."

"No; that's the worst of it,--that there's nobody to turn to--nobody
cares. If I thought that you cared--but----"

"Indeed I care."

"For my soul--yes." Her "yes" was a deep sigh.

"Why not? It is my office. A priest is answerable to God for the souls
of his people."

He spoke with a touch of austerity in his tone. Something warned him
that if this conversation was to be profitable to either of them, he
must avoid personalities. His position in the Church was a compromise.
His attitude towards Audrey Craven was only another kind of
compromise,--so much concession to her weakness, so much to her
appealing womanhood. He had begun by believing in her soul,--that was
the plea he made to the fierce exacting conscience, always requiring a
spiritual motive for his simplest actions,--and he had ended by creating
the thing he believed in, and in his own language he was answerable to
God for it. But hitherto with his own nature he had made no compromise.
He had sacrificed heart, senses, and intellect to the tyranny of his
conscience; he had ceased to dread their insane revolt against that
benevolent despotism. And now the question that tormented him was
whether all the time he had not been temporising with his own inexorable
humanity, whether his relations with Audrey Craven did not involve a
perpetual intrigue between the earthly and the heavenly. For there was a
strange discrepancy between his simple heart that took all things
seriously--even a frivolous woman--and the tortuous entangled thing that
was his conscience. He went on at first in the same self-controlled
voice, monotonous but for a peculiar throbbing stress on some words, and
he seemed to be speaking more to himself than her.

"You say you can do nothing, and I believe it. What of that? The things
that are seen are temporal, the things that are unseen are eternal. Our
deeds are of the things that are seen; they are part of the visible
finite world, done with our hands, with our body. They belong to the
flesh that profiteth nothing. It is only the spirit, only the pure and
holy will, that gives them life. That will is not ours--not yours or
mine. Before we can receive it our will must die; otherwise there would
be two wills in us struggling for possession. You have come to me for
help--after all I can give you none. I can only tell you what I
know--that there is no way of peace but the way of renunciation. I can
only say: if your will is not yet one with