In paralysis, limbs refuse to obey the message of the brain, or, misinterpreting it, do the thing they would not. So, when the roots of a life’s happiness have been struck, the soul cannot hear the message of the over-wrought body that pleads to it for help in vain. In the days that followed, Farquharson and Evelyn travelled again, invisible companions, down the same _via crucis_ of agony and shame. To Evelyn, perhaps, the path was the more difficult to tread because for the first time faith had failed her. "Doubt comes," says the Catholic Church, "to those who wilfully play with sin." Unyielding, inflexible, she would have those who profess her faith remove themselves from the first taint of guilt, failing to help even the sorely wounded if he who suffered were one whose imminence brought danger. It is another of the paradoxes with which faith abounds; there are times when these same paradoxes raise an impenetrable wall against which the human heart beats vainly—bruised, bleeding, outwardly broken. Doggedly Evelyn kept to the open evidences of her belief, sure of their truth, though unable to find comfort in them. She knew priests who had done the same, men who had striven for weeks and years against overwhelming apathy, alone in the desert of temptation. She knew one who had died so, to whom no ray of illumination had come even at the last, although only she and his confessor knew as much. He was a man who had helped more men and women than any other member of his brotherhood; faith seemed to be given him merely to be spent in the service of others. But he was a man, and she was only a woman. And peace of some kind must surely have approached him, if one believes at all in supernatural influences, from the very atmosphere of the praying souls he stood amongst at Mass, from the mere nearness of the Sacred Host. Evelyn lived in an atmosphere of cynicism and doubt; it pressed upon her, bearing her down now that she had no rival force with which to combat it. And because by the narrow channel through which one doubt enters a thousand may follow, she found that the silence and solitude she had once loved were now thronged with ghosts, ghostly visions of the love she might have had but would not, and the life she might have lived with him she loved, one in companionship, one in ambition, one in the most dear and sacred intimacy of marriage, one in failure, one in success, one in the love of the children whose feet they would never now hear, whose lips would never now meet their own.