the dictates of our conscience remains the same.  But Monsignor might not deem this sufficient, and might refuse her absolution.  She strove to convince herself, hurriedly, aware that the moments were fleeting, that she had a soul.  That sense of right and wrong which, like a whip, had driven her here could be nothing else but the voice of her soul; therefore there was a soul, and if there was a soul it could not die, and if it did not die it must go somewhere; therefore there was a heaven and a hell.  But in spite of her desire to convince herself, remembrance of Owen’s arguments whistled like a wind through her pious exhortations, and all that she had read in Huxley and Darwin and Spencer; the very words came back thick and distinct, and like one who finds progress impossible in the face of the gale, she stopped thinking.  “We know nothing ... we know nothing,” were the words she heard in the shriek of the wind, and revealed religion appeared in tattered, miserable plight, a forlorn spectre borne away on the wind.  So distinct was the vision, so explicit her hearing, that she could not pretend to herself that she was a Christian in any but a moral sense, and this would not satisfy Monsignor.  Then question after question pealed in her ears.  What should she say when he came?  Was it not better for her to leave at once?  But then?  She took one step towards the door.  However thin and shallow her belief might be, she must confess her sins.  She felt that she must confess her sins even if she did not believe in confession.  Her thoughts paused, and she was terrified by the mystery which her own existence presented to herself.

The door opened, and the priest stood looking at her.  She could see that he divined the truth.  In the first glance he read that Evelyn had come to confession, and it was for him a moment of extraordinary spiritual elation.

Monsignor Mostyn and Sir Owen had been at school together, and though they had not met since, they frequently heard of each other.  Owen’s ideas of marriage and religion were well known to the priest.  He had heard soon after she had gone away that she had gone with Asher, his old schoolfellow.  He knew the pride that Asher would take in destroying her faith, and this diabolic project he had determined to frustrate; and every year when he returned from Rome, he asked if Evelyn was expected to sing in London that season.  As year after year went by, his chance of saving her soul seemed to grow more remote; but at the bottom of his heart he believed that he was the chosen instrument of God’s grace.  That night at the concert in her father’s house, the first words—­something in her manner, the expression in her eyes, had led him to think that the conversion would be an easy one.  But it had come about quicker than he had expected.  And as he stood looking at her, he was aware of an alloy of personal vanity and strove to stifle it; he thought of himself as the humble instrument selected to win her from this infamous, this renegade Catholic, and the trouble so visible in her was confirmation of his belief that there can be no peace for a Catholic outside the pale of the Church.