His eye fell upon a silver crucifix that was hanging upon the wall in front of him.  He was not a very imaginative man, not a man given to fancies, a dreamer of dreams more real to him than life, or a seer of visions.  But to-day he was stirred, and perhaps the unwonted turmoil of his mind acted subtly upon his nervous system.  Afterward he felt certain that it must have been so, for in no other way could he account for a fantasy that beset him at this moment.

As he looked at the crucifix there came against the church a more furious beating of the wind, and it seemed to him that the Christ upon the crucifix shuddered.

He saw it shudder.  He started, leaned across the table and stared at the crucifix with eyes that were full of an amazement that was mingled with horror.  Then he got up, crossed the room and touched the crucifix with his finger.  As he did so, the acolyte, whose duty it was to help him to robe, knocked at the sacristy door.  The sharp noise recalled him to himself.  He knew that for the first time in his life he had been the slave of an optical delusion.  He knew it, and yet he could not banish the feeling that God himself was averse from the act that he was on the point of committing in this church that confronted Islam, that God himself shuddered as surely even He, the Creator, must shudder at some of the actions of his creatures.  And this feeling added immensely to the distress of the priest’s mind.  In performing this ceremony he now had the dreadful sensation that he was putting himself into direct antagonism with God.  His instinctive horror of Androvsky had never been so great as it was to-day.  In vain he had striven to conquer it, to draw near to this man who roused all the repulsion of his nature.  His efforts had been useless.  He had prayed to be given the sympathy for this man that the true Christian ought to feel towards every human being, even the most degraded.  But he felt that his prayers had not been answered.  With every day his antipathy for Androvsky increased.  Yet he was entirely unable to ground it upon any definite fact in Androvsky’s character.  He did not know that character.  The man was as much a mystery to him as on the day when they first met.  And to this living mystery from which his soul recoiled he was about to consign, with all the beautiful and solemn blessings of his Church, a woman whose character he respected, whose innate purity, strength and nobility he had quickly divined, and no less quickly learned to love.

It was a bitter, even a horrible, moment to him.

The little acolyte, a French boy, son of the postmaster of Beni-Mora, was startled by the sight of the Father’s face when he opened the sacristy door.  He had never before seen such an expression of almost harsh pain in those usually kind eyes, and he drew back from the threshold like one afraid.  His movement recalled the priest to a sharp consciousness of the necessities of the moment, and with a strong effort he conquered his pain sufficiently to conceal all outward expression of it.  He smiled gently at the little boy and said: