of her heart:  her heart would know how to turn the scales, surely enough.  Corona stood still, holding the curtain in her hand.  She was a brave woman, but she turned pale—­not hesitating, she said to herself, but pausing.  Then, suddenly, a great scorn of herself arose in her.  Was it worthy of her even to pause in doing right?  The nobility of her courage cried loudly to her to go in and do the thing most worthy:  her hand lifted the heavy leathern apron, and she entered the church.

The air within was heavy and moist, and the grey light fell coldly through the tall windows.  Corona shuddered, and drew her furs more closely about her as she passed up the aisle to the door of the sacristy.  She found the monk she sought, and she made her confession.

“Padre mio,” she said at last, when the good man thought she had finished—­“Padre mio, I am a very miserable woman.”  She hid her dark face in her ungloved hands, and one by one the crystal tears welled from her eyes and trickled down upon her small fingers and upon the worn black wood of the confessional.

“My daughter,” said the good monk, “I will pray for you, others will pray for you—­but before all things, you must pray for yourself.  And let me advise you, my child, that as we are all led into temptation, we must not think that because we have been in temptation we have sinned hopelessly; nor, if we have fought against the thing that tempts us, should we at once imagine that we have overcome it, and have done altogether right.  If there were no evil in ourselves, there could be no temptation from without, for nothing evil could seem pleasant.  But with you I cannot find that you have done any great wrong as yet.  You must take courage.  We are all in the world, and do what we may, we cannot disregard it.  The sin you see is real, but it is yet not very near you since you so abhor it; and if you pray that you may hate it, it will go further from you till you may hope not even to understand how it could once have been so near.  Take courage—­take comfort.  Do not be morbid.  Resist temptation, but do not analyse it nor yourself too closely; for it is one of the chief signs of evil in us that when we dwell too much upon ourselves and upon our temptations, we ourselves seem good in our own eyes, and our temptations not unpleasant, because the very resisting of them seems to make us appear better than we are.”

But the tears still flowed from Corona’s eyes in the dark corner of the church, and she could not be comforted.

“Padre mio,” she repeated, “I am very unhappy.  I have not a friend in the world to whom I can speak.  I have never seen my life before as I see it now.  God forgive me, I have never loved my husband.  I never knew what it meant to love.  I was a mere child, a very innocent child, when I was married to him.  I would have sought your advice, but they told me you were away, and I thought I was doing right in obeying my father.”