The shades of night crept rapidly up from the valley and soon enveloped the three wayfarers. When they had crossed the river, however, and had turned into the path that led up towards home, their road was lit up by a distant glare that came from the village itself. It looked as if the whole place were on fire; huge flames were leaping on the summit of the ridge, and the keeper’s keen sight distinguished numerous figures moving about in the square in front of the church. It was a Saturday, and nearly all the men would have returned to their homes for the Sunday rest, but this did not explain the reason for the bonfires and the unusual excitement in the village.

‘I know what it is!’ called Antiochus joyfully. ‘They are waiting for us to come back, and they are going to celebrate the miracle of Nina Masia!’

‘Good heavens! Are you quite mad, Antiochus?’ cried the priest, with something akin to terror as he gazed at the hill-side below the village, over which the bonfires were casting their lurid glare.

The keeper made no remark, but in contemptuous silence he rattled the dog’s chain and the animal barked loudly. Whereupon hoarse shouts and yells echoed through the valley, and to the priest in his misery it seemed as though some mysterious voice were protesting against the way in which he had imposed on the simplicity of his parishioners.

‘What have I done to them?’ he asked himself. ‘I have made fools of them just as I have made a fool of myself. May God save us all!’

Suggestions for heroic action rushed into his mind. When he reached the village he would stop in the midst of his people and confess his sin; he would tear open his breast before them all and show them his wretched heart, consumed with grief, but burning more fiercely with the flame of his anguish than the fires of brushwood upon the ridge.

But here the voice of his conscience spoke:

‘It is their faith that they are celebrating. They are glorifying God in thee and thou hast no right to thrust thyself and thy wretchedness between them and God.’

But from deeper still within him another voice made itself heard:

‘It is not that. It is because thou art base and vile and art afraid of suffering, of burning in very truth.’

And the nearer they came to the village and the men, the more abased did Paul feel. As the leaping flames fought with the shadows on the hill-side, so light and darkness seemed to fight in his conscience, and he did not know what to do. He remembered his first arrival in the village years ago, with his mother following him anxiously as she had followed the first steps of his infancy.

‘And I have fallen in her sight,’ he groaned. ‘She thinks she has raised me up again, but I am wounded to death.’

Then suddenly he bethought him, with a sense of relief, that this improvised festival would help him out of his difficulty and avert the danger he feared.