his most stringent commands?  She had had another interview with this forbidden son of perdition, but how it was she knew not.  How could such things have happened?  Instead of shutting her eyes and turning her head and saying prayers, she had listened to a passionate declaration of love, and his last word had called her his wife.  Her heart thrilled every time she thought of it; and somehow she could not feel sure that it was exactly a thrill of penitence.  It was all like a strange dream to her; and sometimes she looked at her little brown hands and wondered if he really had kissed them,—­he, the splendid strange vision of a man, the prince from fairyland!  Agnes had never read romances, it is true, but she had been brought up on the legends of the saints, and there never was a marvel possible to human conception that had not been told there.  Princes had come from China and Barbary and Abyssinia and every other strange out-of-the-way place, to kneel at the feet of fair, obdurate saints who would not even turn the head to look at them; but she had acted, she was conscious, after a much more mortal fashion, and so made herself work for confession and penance.  Yet certainly she had not meant to do so; the interview came on her so suddenly, so unexpectedly; and somehow he would speak, and he would not go when she asked him to; and she remembered how he looked when he stood right before her in the doorway and told her she should hear him,—­how the color flushed up in his cheeks, what a fire there was in his great dark eyes; he looked as if he were going to do something desperate then; it made her hold her breath even now to think of it.

“These princes and nobles,” she thought, “are so used to command, it is no wonder they make us feel as if they must have their will.  I have heard grandmother call them wolves and vultures, that are ready to tear us poor folk to pieces; but I am sure he seems gentle.  I’m sure it isn’t wicked or cruel for him to want to make me his wife; and he couldn’t know, of course, why it wasn’t right he should; and it really is beautiful of him to love me so.  Oh, if I were only a princess, and he loved me that way, how glad I should be to give up everything and go to him alone!  And then we would pray together; and I really think that would be much better than praying all alone.  He said men had so much more to tempt them.  Ah, that is true!  How can little moles that grub in the ground know of the dangers of eagles that fly to the very sun?  Holy Mother, look mercifully upon him and save his soul!”

Such were the thoughts of Agnes the day when she was preparing for her confession; and all the way to church she found them floating and dissolving and reappearing in new forms in her mind, like the silvery smoke-clouds which were constantly veering and sailing over Vesuvius.

Only one thing was firm and never changing, and that was the purpose to reveal everything to her spiritual director.  When she kneeled at the confessional with closed eyes, and began her whispered acknowledgments, she tried to feel as if she were speaking in the ear of God alone,—­that God whose spirit she was taught to believe, for the time being, was present in His minister before whom her inmost heart was to be unveiled.