was conscious, after a much more mortal fashion, and so
made herself work for confession and penance. Yet certainly she had not
meant to do so; the interview came on her so suddenly, so unexpectedly;
and somehow he _would_ speak, and he would not go when she asked him to;
and she remembered how he looked when he stood right before her in the
doorway and told her she _should_ hear him,--how the color flushed up in
his cheeks, what a fire there was in his great dark eyes; he looked as if
he were going to do something desperate then; it made her hold her breath
even now to think of it.

"These princes and nobles," she thought, "are so used to command, it is no
wonder they make us feel as if they must have their will. I have heard
grandmother call them wolves and vultures, that are ready to tear us poor
folk to pieces; but I am sure he seems gentle. I'm sure it isn't wicked or
cruel for him to want to make me his wife; and he couldn't know, of
course, why it wasn't right he should; and it really is beautiful of him
to love me so. Oh, if I were only a princess, and he loved me that way,
how glad I should be to give up everything and go to him alone! And then
we would pray together; and I really think that would be much better than
praying all alone. He said men had so much more to tempt them. Ah, that is
true! How can little moles that grub in the ground know of the dangers of
eagles that fly to the very sun? Holy Mother, look mercifully upon him and
save his soul!"

Such were the thoughts of Agnes the day when she was preparing for her
confession; and all the way to church she found them floating and
dissolving and reappearing in new forms in her mind, like the silvery
smoke-clouds which were constantly veering and sailing over Vesuvius.

Only one thing was firm and never changing, and that was the purpose to
reveal everything to her spiritual director. When she kneeled at the
confessional with closed eyes, and began her whispered acknowledgments,
she tried to feel as if she were speaking in the ear of God alone,--that
God whose spirit she was taught to believe, for the time being, was
present in His minister before whom her inmost heart was to be unveiled.

He who sat within had just returned from his lonely retreat with his mind
and nerves in a state of unnatural tension,--a sort of ecstatic clearness
and calmness, which he mistook for victory and peace. During those lonely
days when he had wandered afar from human conv