With a feeling of relief--with a deep, calm feeling of relief, I turned
back to the mild face in the pulpit and settled myself to listen. Here,
at last, was the ease of mind I longed for.

"My children," said the preacher, "one truth the human soul finds hardest
of all to learn: that it has nothing to fear. It can never be made to see
that nothing can really harm it."

"Curious doctrine!" I thought, "for a Catholic priest. Let us see how he
will reconcile that with the Fathers."

"Nothing can really harm the soul," he went on, in, his coolest, clearest
tones, "because----"

But I never heard the rest; my eye left his face, I knew not for what
reason, and sought the lower end of the church. The same man was coming
out from behind the organ, and was passing along the gallery _the same
way_. But there had not been time for him to return, and if he had
returned, I must have seen him. I felt a faint chill, and my heart sank;
and yet, his going and coming were no affair of mine. I looked at him: I
could not look away from his black figure and his white face. When he was
exactly opposite to me, he turned and sent across the church straight
into my eyes, a look of hate, intense and deadly: I have never seen any
other like it; would to God I might never see it again! Then he
disappeared by the same door through which I had watched him depart less
than sixty seconds before.

I sat and tried to collect my thoughts. My first sensation was like that
of a very young child badly hurt, when it catches its breath before