showed
how loyal and true a woman she was, that, living in the very centre and
midst of the world, admired and assailed by many, she should never in
five years have so much as thought of any man beside her husband. A woman
made for love and happiness, in the glory of beauty and youth, capable
of such unfaltering determination in her loyalty, so good, so noble, so
generous,--it seemed unspeakably pathetic to hear her weeping her heart
out, and confessing that, after so many struggles and efforts and
sacrifices, she had at last met the common fate of all humanity, and
was become subject to love. What might have been her happiness was turned
to dishonour; what should have been the pride of her young life was made
a reproach.

She would not fall. The grey-haired monk believed that, in his great
knowledge of mankind. But she would suffer terribly, and it might be that
others would suffer also. It was the consequence of an irretrievable
error in the beginning, when it had seemed to the young girl just
leaving the convent that the best protection against the world of evil
into which she was to go would be the unconditional sacrifice of herself.

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 certaint