A moment later the priest grasped her in his arms, and his lips seized hers in a long, hard, passionate kiss.
[1] The Latin quotations are from Liguori’s instructions as to the confessional, and are so suggestive that if rendered into English they might exclude this book from the mails. [↑]
XI.
WHAT RUIN MEANS.
Early the following morning Ambrosia Lonzello was released from the convento[1] in which she had been detained the night long, and staggered into the street. Suffering physically, nervous almost to prostration, and mentally overwhelmed with horror, she walked, she scarcely knew where. She felt that she dare not go home—that father and mother had betrayed her, and that now she was an outcast, with no friend and with no place on earth. Even heaven had been deaf to her call, and she felt that the divine Father, too, and the Christ who had sympathized with Magdalene, cared nothing for her.
It is a wise provision of nature, apparently attesting her sympathy with suffering, that when sorrow and pain tug almost to the point of destruction at the heart or body, she provides her own opiate. In the article of death almost all creatures are at peace, and fear nothing. Gradually this numbness came over Ambrosia. She apparently could not realize all that had happened. She ceased to feel the full burden of her anguish, and became numb, as it were. She no longer planned, she followed her heart. Indeed, she became more conscious of the glory of the morning than of her own ruin, and in spite of her mind’s declaration that there was no place in the world for her, she saw nature beautiful and friendly about her and felt that not yet had God excluded her.
Her brain would not work, but her heart thought of Saguanaldo and those whom she had thought to be her friends. It was this thread invisible that led her to the camp of the Americans. When she arrived she met first a minor officer and asked to be shown to the commander in charge.
“All right, Miss, just go into the tent and wait until I bring him,” was the reply to her request.