ustrian
forests, from the Erl-King to Ariel and Oberon.

* * *

"You think any sin may be forgiven?" he said irrelevantly, with his face
averted.

"That is a very wide question. I do not think St. Augustine himself
could answer it in a word or in a moment. Forgiveness, I think, would
surely depend on repentance."

"Repentance in secret--would that avail?"

"Scarcely--would it?--if it did not attain some sacrifice. It would have
to prove its sincerity to be accepted."

"You believe in public penance?" said Sabran, with some impatience and
contempt.

"Not necessarily public," she said, with a sense of perplexity at the
turn his words had taken. "But of what use is it for one to say he
repents unless in some measure he makes atonement?"

"But where atonement is impossible?"

"That could never be."

"Yes. There are crimes whose consequences can never be undone. What
then? Is he who did them shut out from all hope?"

"I am no casuist," she said, vaguely troubled. "But if no atonement were
possible I still think--nay, I am sure--a sincere and intense regret
which is, after all, what we mean by repentance, must be accepted, must
be enough."

"Enough to efface it in the eyes of one who had never sinned?"

"Where is there such a one? I thought you spoke of heaven."

"I spoke of earth. It is all we can be sure to have to do with; it is
our one poor heritage."

"I hope it is but an antechamber which we pass through, and fill with
beautiful things, or befoul with dust and blood, at our own will."

"Hardly at our own will. In your antechamber a capricious tyrant waits
us all at birth. Some come in chained; some free."

* * *

"Do not compare the retreat of the soldier tired of his wounds, of the
gambler wearied by his losses, with the poet or the saint who is at
peace with himself and sees all his life long what he at least believes
to be the smile of God. Loyola and Francis d'Assisi are not the same
thing, are not on the same plane."

"What matter what brought them," she said softly, "if they reach the
same goal?"

* * *

"You bade me do good at Romaris. Candidly, I see no way to do it except
in saving a crew off a wreck, which is not an occasion that presents
itself every week. I cannot benefit these people materially, since I am
poor; I cannot benefit them morally, because I have not their faith in
the things unseen, and I have not their moralit