The priest slowly repeated his former words: 

’I have sinned.  I had no excuse for my sin.  I do penitence for my sin without hope of pardon.  If I tore off my cassock, I should tear away my very flesh, for I have given myself wholly to God, soul and body.  I am a priest.’

‘And I! what is to become of me?’ cried Albine.

He looked unflinchingly at her.

’May your sufferings be reckoned against me as so many crimes!  May I be eternally punished for the desertion in which I am forced to leave you!  That will be only just.  All unworthy though I be, I pray for you each night.’

She shrugged her shoulders with an air of great discouragement.  Her anger was subsiding.  She almost felt inclined to pity him.

‘You are mad,’ she murmured.  ’Keep your prayers.  It is you yourself that I want.  But you will never understand me.  There were so many things I wanted to tell you!  Yet you stand there and irritate me with your chatter of another world.  Come, let us try to talk sensibly.  Let us wait for a moment till we are calmer.  You cannot dismiss me in this way, I cannot leave you here.  It is because you are here that you are so corpse-like, so cold that I dare not touch you.  We won’t talk any more just now.  We will wait a little.’

She ceased speaking, and took a few steps, examining the little church.  The rain was still gently pattering against the windows; and the cold damp light seemed to moisten the walls.  Not a sound came from outside save the monotonous plashing of the rain.  The sparrows were doubtless crouching for shelter under the tiles, and the rowan-tree’s deserted branches showed but indistinctly in the veiling, drenching downpour.  Five o’clock struck, grated out, stroke by stroke, from the wheezy chest of the old clock; and then the silence fell again, seeming to grow yet deeper, dimmer, and more despairing.  The priest’s painting work, as yet scarcely dry, gave to the high altar and the wainscoting an appearance of gloomy cleanliness, like that of some convent chapel where the sun never shines.  Grievous anguish seemed to fill the nave, splashed with the blood that flowed from the limbs of the huge Christ; while, along the walls, the fourteen scenes of the Passion displayed their awful story in red and yellow daubs, reeking with horror.  It was life that was suffering the last agonies there, amidst that deathlike quiver of the atmosphere, upon those altars which resembled tombs, in that bare vault which looked like a sepulchre.  The surroundings all spoke of slaughter and gloom, terror and anguish and nothingness.  A faint scent of incense still lingered there, like the last expiring breath of some dead girl, who had been hurriedly stifled beneath the flagstones.