en he recovered his senses, sight and sound and sensibility all
returning to him slowly and with a strange, numb, pricking pain in his
limbs and his body and his brain, the church was quite dark, and the man
who had confessed his crime to him was gone.

Gesualdo gathered himself up with effort, and sat down on the wooden
seat and tried to think. He was bitterly ashamed of his own weakness.
What was he worth, he, shepherd and leader of men, if at the first word
of horror which affrighted him he fainted as women faint, and failed to
speak in answer the condemnation which should have been spoken? Was it
for such cowardice as this that they had anointed him and received him
as a servitor of the Church?

His first impulse was to go and relate his feebleness and failure to his
bishop; the next moment he remembered that even so much support as this
he must not seek: to no living being must he tell this wretched
blood-secret.

The law which respects nothing would not respect the secrets of the
confessional; but he knew that all the human law in the world could not
alter his own bondage to the duty he had with his own will accepted.

It was past midnight when, with trembling limbs, he groped his way out
of the porch of his church and found the entrance of the presbytery and
climbed the stone stairs to his own chamber.

Candida opened her door, and thrust her head through the aperture, and
cried to him,--

"Where have you been mooning all this while, and the lamp burning to
waste, and your good bed yawning for you? You are not a strong man
enough to keep these hours, and for a priest they are not decent ones."

"Peace, woman!" said Gesualdo, in a tone which she had never heard from
him. He went within and closed the door. He longed for the light of
dawn, and yet he dreaded it.

When the dawn came it brought nothing to him except the knowledge that
the real murderer was there, within a quarter of a mile of him, and yet
could not be denounced by him to justice even to save the guiltless. The
usual occupations of a week-day claimed his time, and he went through
them all with mechanical precision, but he spoke all his words as in a
dream, and the red sanded bricks of his house, the deal table, with the
black coffee and the round loaf set out on it, the stone sink at which
Candida was washing endive and cutting lettuces, the old men and women
who came and went telling their troubles garrulously and begging for
pence, the suns