ression
that she had lived with Owen the moderate, sexual life which she
believed was maintained between husband and wife.

"My life during the last six years," she said, interrupting him, "has
been so abandoned. There are few--there are no excesses of which I have
not been guilty."

"You have said enough on that point," he answered, to her great relief.
But at that moment she remembered Ulick, and she felt that she must
mention him. To do so she had again to interrupt the priest.

"But I must tell you--Sir Owen was not the only one"--she bowed her
head--"there was another." Then, yielding to the temptation to explain
herself, she told Monsignor how it was this second sin that had awakened
her conscience. She had tried to look upon Sir Owen as her husband. "But
one night at the theatre, during a performance of 'Tristan and Isolde,'
I sinned with this second man."

"And this showed you, my dear child, the impossibility of a moral life
for one who was born a Catholic except when protected by the doctrine
and the sacraments of our Holy Church. And that brings us back to the
point from which we started--the necessity of an unquestioning
acceptance of the entire doctrine, and, I may add, a general
acquiescence in Catholic belief. It seems strange to you that I am more
anxious about your sins against faith than your sins of the flesh. It
is because I know that without faith you will fall again. It is because
I know the danger, the seduction of the theory that even if there be
neither hell nor heaven, yet the obligation to lead a moral life exists.
Such theory is in essence Protestantism and a delicious flattery of the
vanity of human nature. It has been the cause of the loss of millions of
souls. You yourself are a living testimony of the untrustworthiness of
this shelter, and it is entirely contrary to the spirit of the teaching
of the Church, which is that we must lead a moral life in order to gain
heaven and avoid the pain of hell."

She leaned heavily on the table to relieve her knees from as much weight
as possible, and she thought of the possibility of getting her
handkerchief out of her pocket and placing it under her. But when her
confession turned from her sins against faith to her sins of the flesh,
she forgot the pain of her knees.

"There is one more question I must ask you. You have lived with this man
as his mistress for six years, you have spoken of the excesses to which
you abandoned yourself, but more