d beg and
entreat you to come to us again. Meantime, since you cannot visit me, I
visit you. Confess me, father, and then direct me with your counsels.
Ah! if you could but give me the Christian temper to carry them out
firmly but meekly! 'T is my ungoverned spirit hath wrought all this
mischief,--_mea culpa! mea culpa!_"

By this time Leonard had recovered his self-possession, and he spent an
hour of strange intoxication, confessing his idol, sentencing his idol
to light penances, directing and advising his idol, and all in the soft
murmurs of a lover.

She left him, and the room seemed to darken.

Two days only elapsed, and she came again. Visit succeeded to visit: and
her affection seemed boundless.

The insult he had received was to be avenged in one place, and healed in
another, and, if possible, effaced with tender hand. So she kept all her
sweetness for that little cottage, and all her acidity for Hernshaw
Castle.

It was an evil hour when Griffith attacked her saint with violence. The
woman was too high-spirited, and too sure of her own rectitude, to
endure that: so, instead of crushing her, it drove her to
retaliation,--and to imprudence.

These visits to console Father Leonard were quietly watched by Ryder,
for one thing. But, worse than that, they placed Mrs. Gaunt in a new
position with Leonard, and one that melts the female heart. She was now
the protectress and the consoler of a man she admired and revered. I say
if anything on earth can breed love in a grand female bosom, this will.

She had put her foot on a sunny slope clad with innocent-looking
flowers; but more and more precipitous at every step, and perdition at
the bottom.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Father Leonard, visited, soothed, and petted by his idol, recovered his
spirits, and, if he pined during her absence, he was always so joyful in
her presence that she thought of course he was permanently happy; so
then, being by nature magnanimous and placable, she began to smile on
her husband again, and a tacit reconciliation came about by natural
degrees.

But this produced a startling result.

Leonard, as her confessor, could learn everything that passed between
them; he had only to follow established precedents, and ask questions
his Church has printed for the use of confessors. He was mad enough to
put such interrogatories.

The consequence was, that one day, being off his guard, or literally
unable to contain his bursting heart any longer