She gathered up the books and papers and replaced them on the table. Then she noticed an open Bible, with a coloured picture that she greatly admired, and she bent down to examine it more closely. There was Jesus the Good Shepherd watering His sheep at a spring in the midst of a forest. Between the trees, against the background of blue sky, could be seen a distant city, red in the light of the setting sun, a holy city, the City of Salvation.

There had been a time when he used to study far into the night; the stars over the ridge looked in at his window and the nightingales sang him their plaintive notes. For the first year after they came to the village he often talked of leaving and going back into the world: then he settled down into a sort of waking sleep, in the shadow of the ridge and the murmur of the trees. Thus seven years passed, and his mother never suggested they should move elsewhere, for they were so happy in the little village that seemed to her the most beautiful in all the world, because her Paul was its saviour and its king.

She closed the window and replaced the mirror, which showed her now her own face grown white and drawn, her eyes dim with tears. Again she asked herself if perhaps she were not mistaken. She turned towards a crucifix which hung on the wall above a kneeling-stool, raising the lamp above her head that she might see it better; and midst the shadows that her movements threw on the wall it seemed as though the Christ, thin and naked, stretched upon the Cross, bowed His head to hear her prayer. And great tears coursed down her face and fell upon her dress, heavy as tears of blood.

‘Lord, save us all! Save Thou me, even me. Thou Who hangest there pale and bloodless, Thou Whose Face beneath its crown of thorns is sweet as a wild rose, Thou Who art above our wretched passions, save us all!’

Then she hurried out of the room and went downstairs. She passed through the tiny dining-room, where drowsy flies, startled by the lamp, buzzed heavily round and the howling wind and swaying trees outside beat like rain upon the small high window, and thence into the kitchen, where she sat down before the fire, already banked up with cinders for the night. Even there the wind seemed to penetrate by every crack and cranny, so that instead of being in the long low kitchen, whose uneven ceiling was supported by smoke-blackened beams and rafters, she felt as if she were in a rocking boat adrift on a stormy sea. And although determined to wait up for her son and begin the battle at once, she still fought against conviction and tried to persuade herself that she was mistaken.

She felt it unjust that God should send her such sorrow, and she went back over her past life, day by day, trying to find some reason for her present unhappiness; but all her days had passed hard and clean as the beads of the rosary she held in her shaking fingers. She had done no wrong, unless perchance sometimes in her thoughts.