“I loved her.  That was perhaps an illness also, for I never suffered in that way again.  It was very terrible, for I knew what a great sin it was to love my father’s wife.  I never told her that I loved her, and she was always the same, kind and good.  My heart was red-hot iron in my breast, day and night, and it was very long before I was really well again.  After that, I confessed my sin many times, but I could not feel repentance for it.  My father wondered, and so did she, why I would not go back to the seminary for the few months that remained to complete my studies.  It would have been better if I had gone back.  But I loved her, and I could not.  I could not confess the sin in my heart to the confessor of the seminary, for whom I had great esteem and who had known me so long, I was ashamed, and waited, thinking that it would pass.  But I wished to escape.

“I joined myself as a lay brother to a Franciscan mission that was going to Africa.  My father made many objections to this, but I overcame them.  I think he guessed that I loved his wife, and though he loved me, too, he was glad that I should go away.  As for me, I trusted that in the labours of a distant mission I should forget my love, feel honest repentance, receive absolution, and be ordained a true priest by a missionary bishop.

“We were seven who started together upon that mission.  After two years I alone was left alive.  One after the other they died of the fever of that country.  We had written for help, but I knew afterwards that our letters had not reached the sea.  That was why no one came to bring help.  We had converted people amongst those savages and had built a chapel.  Even those who were not converted were friendly, for we had taught them many things.  My companions all died, one by one, and I buried the last.  But I myself was never ill of the fever.  Yet the people there clung around me.  I committed a great sin.  They had no priest, and they did not understand that I was not one, for I dressed like the others.  If there were no more services in the little chapel, they would think that Christianity was dead, and they would fall back to their former condition.  I took the sin upon myself, and I said mass for them, knowing that it was no mass, and praying that God would forgive me, and that it might not be a sacrilege.  I did not fall ill.  I lived amongst them, and received their confessions and administered all the sacraments when they were required, for the space of a year and a half, during which I sent many appeals for help.  But in my letters I did not explain what I was doing, for I intended to go to the bishop if I ever got home alive, and confess to him.