Padre Filippo was silent.  He hoped that the passionate outburst of grief and self-reproach would pass, though he himself could find little enough to say.  It was all too natural.  What was he, he thought, that he should explain away nature, and bid a friendless woman defy a power that has more than once overset the reckoning of the world?  He could bid her pray for help and strength, but he found it hard to argue the case with her; for he had to allow that his beautiful penitent was, after all, only experiencing what it might have been foretold that she must feel, and that, as far as he could see, she was struggling bravely against the dangers of her situation.

Corona cried bitterly as she knelt there.  It was a great relief to give way for a time to the whole violence of what she felt.  It may be that in her tears there was a subtle instinctive knowledge that she was weeping for her love as well as for her sin in loving, but her grief was none the less real.  She did not understand herself.  She did not know, as Padre Filippo knew, that her woman’s heart was breaking for sympathy rather than for religious counsel.  She knew many women, but her noble pride would not have let her even contemplate the possibility of confiding in any one of them, even if she could have done so in the certainty of not being herself betrayed and of not betraying the man she loved.  She had been accustomed to come to her confessor for counsel, and she now came to him with her troubles and craved sympathy for them, in the knowledge that Padre Filippo could never know the name of the man who had disturbed her peace.

But the monk understood well enough, and his kind heart comprehended hers and felt for her.

“My daughter,” he said at last, when she seemed to have grown more calm, “it would be an inestimable advantage if this man could go away for a time, but that is probably not to be expected.  Meanwhile, you must not listen to him if he speaks—­”

“It is not that,” interrupted Corona—­“it is not that.  He never speaks of love.  Oh, I really believe he does not love me at all!” But in her heart she felt that he must love her; and her hand, as it lay upon the hard wood of the confessional, seemed still to feel his trembling arm.

“That is so much the better, my child,” said the monk, quietly.  “For if he does not love you, your temptations will not grow stronger.”

“And yet, perhaps—­he may—­” murmured Corona, feeling that it would be wrong even to conceal her faintest suspicions at such a time.

“Let there be no perhaps,” answered Padre Filippo, almost sternly.  “Let it never enter your mind that he might love you.  Think that even from the worldly point there is small dignity in a woman who exhibits love for a man who has never mentioned love to her.  You have no reason to suppose you are loved save that you desire to be.  Let there be no perhaps.”