purgatory was like! What do the priests know? When we were threatened
with punishment of our sins not a hint did we have of this. To sleep for
a few hours, haunted with the moment of awakening! Then a cruel insult
from the earth that is tired of us, and the orchestra of hell. Again!
and again! and again! Oh God! How long? How long?"

The priest stumbled to his feet and ran over graves and paths to the
mound above the countess. There he would hear a voice praising the
monster of night and dawn, a note of content in this terrible chorus of
despair which he believed would drive him mad. He vowed that on the
morrow he would move his dead, if he had to un-bury them with his own
hands and carry them up the hill to graves of his own making.

For a moment he heard no sound. He knelt and laid his ear to the grave,
then pressed it more closely and held his breath. A long rumbling moan
reached it, then another and another. But there were no words.

"Is she moaning in sympathy with my poor friends?" he thought; "or have
they terrified her? Why does she not speak to them? Perhaps they would
forget their plight were she to tell them of the world they have left so
long. But it was not their world. Perhaps that it is which distresses
her, for she will be lonelier here than on earth. Ah!"

A sharp horrified cry pierced to his ears, then a gasping shriek, and
another; all dying away in a dreadful smothered rumble.

The priest rose and wrung his hands, looking to the wet skies for
inspiration.

"Alas!" he sobbed, "she is not content. She has made a terrible mistake.