olic loses his faith, it is because he desires to lead a loose
life," and she hardly dared to look into her soul, knowing that she
would find confirmation of this opinion. She had not been to Mass,
because at the Elevation she believed in spite of herself; so she had
been as insincere in her unfaith as in her faith. Then there were the
sins of the flesh, and their number and their blackness terrified her.
There were sins that she strove to put out of her mind at once, sins she
was even ashamed to think of; and the thought of confessing them struck
her down, and once more it seemed that she could never raise herself out
of the slough into which she had fallen. She had all along taken it for
granted that a general admission that she had lived with Owen as his
wife would be sufficient. But now it seemed to her that she would have
to tell Monsignor how gross her life had been.

In a corner of the room her sins crowded, and covering her face with her
hands, she was convinced that she could not go to confession.

Before she went away with Owen she had had no sins to confess, or only
venial sins; that she had been late for Mass through her own fault; that
she had omitted her evening prayers. Her worst sin was the reading of a
novel which she thought she ought not to have read, but now her life was
all sin. If the priest questioned her she could not answer, she must
refuse to answer. So there seemed no hope for her. She could not confess
everything, and the conviction suddenly possessed her that God had
deserted her, and she could not hope for redemption from her present
life. For she could not confess all her sins; her heart would fail her,
she would be tempted to conceal something, and then to her other sins
she would add the sin of a bad confession.

Nervous pains began again in her arms and neck, and she experienced the
same wasting away of the very substance of her being, of the protecting
envelope of the unconscious. She was again a mere mentality, and she
looked round the room with a frightened, distracted air. On the table
was the book Monsignor had given her, _Sin and Its Consequences_. But
she turned from it with a smile. She did not need anyone to tell her
what were the consequences of sin--and the familiar proverb of bringing
coals to Newcastle rose up in her mind. At the same moment she caught
sight of the clock; it was half-past twelve, and she remembered that in
about three hours and a half it would be time to g