The priest held a listening ear against the girl’s side. “She lives, old friend. Her heart is beating—but sluggishly. Let me carry her to the divan, where she will be more comfortable. It is only a fainting spell.”

Father Rooney knew well the name of the fear that was lifting a grisly head in his friend’s breast, and his heart ached for the old doctor, who followed him haltingly and painfully as he carried the limp little form across the room and disposed it on the broad divan. Sitting beside her, the priest began to stroke Clare’s hands softly, while her father held a bottle of salts under her nose.

The lame girl stirred feebly. Then suddenly she broke out into hysterical sobbing, so heart-racking and so pitiful that tears rose to the eyes of the old priest who had seen so much, heard so much, of human suffering, that one felt he must have grown hardened by it. Now, however, he sat stroking a limp, cold hand, and hot tears slowly formed in his eyes and dropped upon it.

He loved Clare as though she had been his own child. Hers was a rare soul that knew and appreciated the lofty truths in his church just as she recognized and loved the same unchangeable truths that formed the foundation of the faith of her fathers. For so young a girl (she was only nineteen) Clare possessed a lucidity of thought and a fairness of judgment that made her especially interesting to the good priest, who secretly believed her one of God’s favored souls.

“She has never been like this before,” worried Dr. Sloane, wrinkled brow troubled. “Clare, dear! Clare! It’s Dad calling you, dear. Clare!”

The girl’s sobbing increased in intensity. Her body began to writhe on the divan as if in sharp agony. The priest in Father Rooney lifted an attentive ear to the undertones of this sobbing that somehow fell strangely upon that clerical ear; he felt intuitively that here was a matter of soul trouble, not a mere hysterical weakness on Clare’s part, and he was deeply disturbed.

Suddenly he looked up sharply and threw a searching glance about the room. His eye met that of Dr. Sloane, who had also looked about quickly.

“I would have sworn that there was someone else in the room just now,” said the doctor in a puzzled tone, as he met his friend’s gaze. “Didn’t you feel it, yourself?”

The expression of the priest’s face was troubled. “A very unpleasant someone, if you care for my opinion,” he declared dryly. “I presume it was the effect on us of our poor little Clare’s hysterics,” he offered, but without conclusiveness.