Apparently mass was just over. Little spirelets of smoke were rising from the candles on the altar which the sacristan was putting out, a few communicants were still on their knees, and others with light yet echoing footsteps were making for the door.
The lady in furs had already taken her place at one of the confessional boxes, and as there seemed to be no other that was occupied by a priest, I knelt on a chair in the nave and tried to fix my mind on the prayers (once so familiar) for the examination of conscience before confession:
"Oh, Lord Jesus Christ, dispel the darkness of my heart, that I may bewail my sins and rightly confess them."
But the labouring of my spirit was like the flight of a bat in the daylight. Though I tried hard to keep my mind from wandering, I could not do so. Again and again it went back to the lady in furs with the coroneted carriage and the high-stepping horses.
She was about my own age, and she began to rise before my tightly closed eyes as a vision of what I might have been myself if I had not given up everything for love—wealth, rank, title, luxury.
God is my witness that down to that moment I had never once thought I had made any sacrifice, but now, as by a flash of cruel lightning, I saw myself as I was—a peeress who had run away from her natural condition and was living in the slums, working like any other work-girl.
Even this did not hurt me much, but when I thought of the rosy-faced child in the carriage, and then of my own darling at Mrs. Oliver's as I had seen her last, so thin and pale, and with her little bib stained by her curdled milk, a feeling I had never had before pierced to my very soul.
I asked myself if this was what God looked down upon and permitted—that because I had obeyed what I still believed to be the purest impulse of my nature, love, my child must be made to suffer.
Then something hard began to form in my heart. I told myself that what I had been taught to believe about God was falsehood and deception.
All this time I was trying to hush down my mind by saying my prayer, which called on the gracious Virgin Mary to intercede for me with my Redeemer, and the holy Saints of God to assist me.