“My life during the last six years,” she said, interrupting him, “has been so abandoned.  There are few—­there are no excesses of which I have not been guilty.”

“You have said enough on that point,” he answered, to her great relief.  But at that moment she remembered Ulick, and she felt that she must mention him.  To do so she had again to interrupt the priest.

“But I must tell you—­Sir Owen was not the only one”—­she bowed her head—­“there was another.”  Then, yielding to the temptation to explain herself, she told Monsignor how it was this second sin that had awakened her conscience.  She had tried to look upon Sir Owen as her husband.  “But one night at the theatre, during a performance of ‘Tristan and Isolde,’ I sinned with this second man.”

“And this showed you, my dear child, the impossibility of a moral life for one who was born a Catholic except when protected by the doctrine and the sacraments of our Holy Church.  And that brings us back to the point from which we started—­the necessity of an unquestioning acceptance of the entire doctrine, and, I may add, a general acquiescence in Catholic belief.  It seems strange to you that I am more anxious about your sins against faith than your sins of the flesh.  It is because I know that without faith you will fall again.  It is because I know the danger, the seduction of the theory that even if there be neither hell nor heaven, yet the obligation to lead a moral life exists.  Such theory is in essence Protestantism and a delicious flattery of the vanity of human nature.  It has been the cause of the loss of millions of souls.  You yourself are a living testimony of the untrustworthiness of this shelter, and it is entirely contrary to the spirit of the teaching of the Church, which is that we must lead a moral life in order to gain heaven and avoid the pain of hell.”

She leaned heavily on the table to relieve her knees from as much weight as possible, and she thought of the possibility of getting her handkerchief out of her pocket and placing it under her.  But when her confession turned from her sins against faith to her sins of the flesh, she forgot the pain of her knees.

“There is one more question I must ask you.  You have lived with this man as his mistress for six years, you have spoken of the excesses to which you abandoned yourself, but more important than these is whether you deliberately avoided the probable consequences of your sin—­I mean in regard to children?”

“If we sin we must needs avoid the consequences of our sin.  I know that it is forbidden—­but my profession—­I had to think of others—­my father—­”