'Eve, I must tell you something.'
'Fru Thyregod?' she cried, and the difficulty of his task became all but insurmountable.
'Something serious. Something about Father Paul.'
Her strange eyes gave him a glance of undefinable suspicion.
'What about him?'
'He has been found, in the water, at the bottom of the garden.'
'In the water?'
'In the sea. Drowned.'
He told her all the circumstances, doggedly, conscientiously, under the mockery of the tinsel flames that streamed out from the top of the columns, and of the distant lights flashing through the windows, speaking as a man who proclaims in a foreign country a great truth bought by the harsh experience of his soul, to an audience unconversant with his alien tongue. This truth that he had won, in the presence of quiet stars, quieter death, and simple men, was desecrated by its recital to a vain woman in a room where the very architecture was based on falsity. Still he persevered, believing that his own intensity of feeling must end in piercing its way to the foundations of her heart. He laid bare even his harassing conviction of his neglected responsibility,—