's confession. It is from myself. Can I come to-morrow or the
next day?"

"Come in a week," Paul answered. "I shall be able to talk calmly then
about this."

Father Adrian hesitated. "A week! Well, let it be so, then. Farewell!"

CHAPTER XXVIII

"ADREA'S DIARY"

"Spring blossoms on the land, and anguish in the heart."

To-night I shall close my diary for a long while, very likely for
ever. I am heartily thankful for it. These last few days have been so
wretched, full of so much miserable uncertainty, that their record has
grown to be a wearisome task. It has ceased to give me any relief; it
has become nothing but a burden. How could it be otherwise, when
the days themselves have been so grey, so full of shadows and
disappointments? You have been a relief to me sometimes, my silent
friend; but what lies before me is not to be recorded in your pages.

Twenty-four hours have passed since I made my last entry. It was night
then, and it is night now. All that lies between seems phantasmagoric
and unreal. I ask myself whether it has really happened; and when
the day's events rise slowly up before my memory, I almost fail to
recognise them. Yet I have but to close my eyes and lean back, and it
all crowds in upon me. In the future I know that this day will stand
out clear and distinct from all the rest of my life.

It was early in the morning when I started for Vaux Abbey across the
moorland road. So long have I seen this bleak county wrapped in mists
and sea fogs that to-day I scarcely recognised it. There was a clear
blue sky, streaked with little patches of white, wind-swept clouds,
and the sun--actually the sun--was shining brilliantly. How it changed
everything! The grey, hungry sea, which I had never been able to look
upon without a shudder, seemed to have caught the colouring of the
sky, and a million little scintillations of glistening light rose and
fell at every moment on the bosom of the tiny, white-crested waves.
And the moorland, too, was transformed. Its bare, rock-strewn
undulations lost all their harshness of outline and colouring in the
sweet, glancing sunlight; and afar off the line of rugged hills, which
I had never seen save with their heads wreathed in a cloud of white
mist, stood out clear and distinct against the distant horizon, tinged
with a dim, purple light.

Why did it all make such an impression upon me, I wonder? I cannot
say; but nothing in all my life ever struck so deep a