k from the comfort of the Church a great
one?"

"The greatest, save one."

"What would be the greatest?"

"To curse God."

"The next?"

"To murder."

The other's whole manner changed on the instant. He was no longer
the stern Churchman, the inveterate friend of Justice, the prejudiced
priest, rigid in a pious convention, who could neither bend nor break.
The sin of an infidel breaker of the law, that was one thing; the crime
of a son of the Church, which a human soul came to relate in its agony,
that was another. He had a crass sense of justice, but there was in
him a deeper thing still: the revelation of the human soul, the
responsibility of speaking to the heart which has dropped the folds of
secrecy, exposing the skeleton of truth, grim and staring, to the eye of
a secret earthly mentor.

"If it has been hidden all these years, why do you tell it now, my son?"

"It is the only way."

"Why was it hidden?"

"I have come to confess," answered the man bitterly. The priest looked
at him anxiously. "You have spoken rightly, my son. I am not here to
ask, but to receive."

"Forgive me, but it is my crime I would speak of now. I choose this
moment that another should not suffer for what he did not do."

The priest thought of the man they had left in the little house, and the
crime with which he was charged, and wondered what the sinner before him
was going to say.

"Tell your story, my son, and God give your tongue the very spirit of
truth, that nothing be forgotten and nothing excused."

There was a fleeting pause, in which the colour left the priest's
face, and, as he opened the door of his mind--of the Church, secret
and inviolate--he had a pain at his heart; for beneath his arrogant
churchmanship there was a fanatical spirituality of a mediaeval kind.
His sense of responsibility was painful and intense. The same pain
possessed him always, were the sin that of a child or a Borgia.

As he listened to the broken tale, the forest around was vocal, the
chipmunks scampered from tree to tree, the woodpecker's tap-tap,
tap-tap, went on over their heads, the leaves rustled and gave forth
their divine sweetness, as though man and nature were at peace, and
there were no storms in sky above or soul beneath, or in the waters of
life that are deeper than "the waters under the earth."

It was only a short time, but to the door-keeper and the wayfarer
it seemed hours, for the human soul travels far and hard and long