It was a horrible position for her.  She, a Catholic, knew now pretty well the history of this man—­that he himself was a priest who had lost the faith, who had associated himself with an historian who was writing a history of the Popes from what he called an impartial standpoint, who had, as the doctor said, distinctly and resentfully refused the suggestion that another priest should be sent to help him to make his peace before he died.  And, for her, as a convinced Catholic, the position had a terror that is simply inconceivable to those of a less positive faith.

She could do nothing more. . . .  She said her beads.

* * * * *

There was a curious mixture of silence and sound here on this Easter Sunday in this bare, airy little ward, with the door closed, and the windows open only at the top.  The room had a remote kind of atmosphere about it, obtained perhaps partly by the solidity of the walls, partly by the fact that it looked out on to a comparatively unfrequented lane, partly by the suggestiveness of a professional sick-room.  The world was all about it; yet it seemed rather to this nurse, sitting alone at her prayers and duties, as if she had a window into the common world of life rather than that she actually was a part of it.  Even the sounds that entered here had this remote tone about them; the footsteps and talking of strayed holiday-makers, occasional fragmentary peals of bells, the striking of the clock in the high Victoria Tower—­all these noises came into the room delicately and suggestively rather than as interruptions, yet distinct and noticeable because of the absence of the usual rush of traffic across the great square outside.

The nurse dozed a little over her beads. (She had been on duty since the evening before, and would not be relieved for another hour yet.) And it seemed to her, as so often in that half-sleep, half-wakefulness, when the drowsy brain knows all necessary things and awakes alert again in an instant at any unusual movement or sound, as if these sounds began to take on them tones of other causes than those of themselves.

It seemed, for example, as if the steady murmur were the shouting of phantom crowds at an immeasurable distance, punctuated now again by the noise of distant guns, as, somewhere round a corner a vehicle passed over a crossing of cobble-stones; as if the bells of the churches rang with a deliberate purpose, to welcome or rejoice over some event . . . some entry of a king, she fancied, in a far-off city.  Once even, so deep grew her drowsiness, she fancied herself looking down on some such city, herself up in the sunlight and air, floating on the cloudy vessel of her own sleep. . . .

“Pray for us sinners,” she murmured, “now and in the hour of our death.”

Then she awoke in earnest, and saw the eyes of the patient fixed intelligently upon her.

“Fetch a priest,” he said.

* * * * *