He shook his head.
'Madame, you see a man dying of hunger and thirst! He cannot cheat himself with fine words. He starves!'
She stared at him, startled—partly understanding.
'For forty-two years,' he said, in a low, pathetic voice, 'have I received my Lord—day after day—without a break. And now "they have taken Him away—and I know not where they have laid Him!"'
Nothing could be more desolate than tone and look. Eleanor understood. She had seen this hunger before. She remembered a convent in Rome where on Good Fridays some of the nuns were often ill with restlessness and longing, because for twenty-four hours the Sacrament was not upon the altar.
Under the protection of her reverent and pitying silence he gradually recovered himself. With great delicacy, with fine and chosen words, she began to try and comfort him, dwelling on his comradeship with all the martyrs of the world, on the help and support that would certainly gather round him, on the new friends that would replace the old. And as she talked there grew up in her mind an envy of him so passionate, so intense, that she could have thrown herself at his feet there and then and opened her own wretched heart to him.
He, tortured by the martyrdom of thought, by the loss of Christian fellowship!—She, scorched and consumed by a passion that was perfectly ready to feed itself on the pain and injury of the beloved, or the innocent, as soon as its own selfish satisfaction was denied it! There was a moment when she felt herself unworthy to breathe the same air with him.
She stared at him, frowning and pale, her hand clasping her breast, lest he should hear the beating of her heart.
* * * * *
Then the hand dropped. The inner tumult passed. And at the same moment the sound of steps was heard approaching.