"And your poor?"
"Can get on without me."
"You are to be buried in the country?" she cried in indignation; "you are to leave all the people you are helping? But what a horrible shame! What,"—she suddenly turned away as a thought struck her—"what can be the reason?"
"It seems," he said very quietly, "that I have been foolish; people are talking, things are said against me, and things should not be said against a priest. But I did not come here to talk about myself. I came here——" He paused.
Molly sat down close to the empty fireplace, and was bending over it, her very thin figure curiously twisted, and one foot twitching nervously.
"You are going away," she said suddenly, "and it is my doing. I did not know I was doing that; it felt as if hitting at you were the only way to defend myself. Good God! I shall have a lot to answer for!"
She did not turn round; she crouched lower on the low chair and shuddered.
"And you," she went on in a low voice, "you want to save my soul! I have always been afraid you would get the best of it, and now I have destroyed your life's work. Did you know it was I who was talking against you?"
"I did."
"And that I have said everything I dared to say against you ever since I told you my secret?"