And so she worked and lived only for him.
She had lacked neither the occasion nor the inclination to indulge in pleasures, if not in sin. Master and servants, peasant and townsman, all had tried to catch her as once the old kinsman had caught her amongst the tamarisks. Man is a hunter and woman his prey, but she had succeeded in evading all pitfalls and keeping herself pure and good, since she already looked on herself as the mother of a priest. Then wherefore now this chastisement, O Lord?
She bowed her weary head and the tears rolled down her face and fell on the rosary in her lap.
Gradually she grew drowsy, and confused memories floated through her mind. She thought she was in the big warm kitchen of the Seminary, where she had been servant for ten years and where she had succeeded in getting her Paul admitted as student. Black figures went silently to and fro, and in the passage outside she could hear the smothered laughter and larking the boys indulged in when there was nobody to reprove them. Tired to death, she sat beside a window opening on to a dark yard, a duster on her lap, but too weary to move so much as a finger towards her work. In the dream, too, she was waiting for Paul, who had slipped out of the Seminary secretly without telling her where he was going.
"If they find out they will expel him at once," she thought, and she waited anxiously till the house was quite quiet that she might let him in without being observed.
Suddenly she awoke and found herself back in the narrow presbytery kitchen, shaken by the wind like a ship at sea, but the impression of the dream was so strong that she felt on her lap for the duster and listened for the smothered laughter of the boys knocking each other about in the passage. Then in a moment reality gripped her again, and she thought Paul must have come in while she was fast asleep and thus succeeded in escaping her notice. And actually, midst all the creakings and shaking caused by the wind, she could hear steps inside the house: some one was coming downstairs, crossing the ground-floor rooms, entering the kitchen. She thought she was still dreaming when a short, stout priest, with a week's growth of beard upon his chin, stood before her and looked her in the face with a smile. The few teeth he had left were blackened with too much smoking, his light-coloured eyes pretended to be fierce, but she could tell that he was really laughing, and immediately she knew him for the former priest—but still she did not feel afraid.
"It is only a dream," she told herself, but in reality she knew she only said that to give herself courage and that it was no phantom, but a fact.
"Sit down," she said, moving her stool aside to make room for him in front of the fire. He sat down and drew up his cassock a little, exhibiting a pair of discoloured and worn blue stockings.
"Since you are sitting here doing nothing, you might mend my stockings for me, Maria Maddalena: I have no woman to look after me," he said simply. And she thought to herself:
"Can this be the terrible priest? That shows I am still dreaming."