The Cardinal laid his hand on the priest's knee.
"Now let us have a talk," he said.
(IV)
The air that breathed down from the Alps was beginning to cloud the windows of the cabin before they had finished talking.
The man who had lost his memory, under the tremendous stress of an emotion of which he was hardly directly conscious at all—the emotion generated by the knowledge that every whistling mile that fled past brought him nearer an almost certain death—had experienced a kind of sudden collapse of his defences such as he had never contemplated.
He had told everything straight out to this quiet, fatherly man—his terrors, his shrinking from the unfamiliar atmosphere of thought to which he had awakened, it seemed, a few months before, his sense that Christianity had lost its spirit, and, above all, the strange absence of any definite religious emotion in himself. He found this difficult to put into words; he had hardly realized it even to himself.
The Cardinal put one question.
"And yet you are facing death on the understanding that it is all true?"
"I suppose so."
"Very well, then. That is faith. You need say no more. You have been to confession?"