Althea understood nothing whatever of the ceremony of the Mass; nor, on this morning, did she seek to understand it. It was not for this purpose she had come to St. Mary's. It was to feel again a sense of that strange nearness to her uncle and her child; to feel again near to Heaven and to God. And, though her conscience had been painfully aroused, though she felt keenly a thousand stings and reproaches, which would probably but be renewed and heightened by this repeated visit, she would not have remained away, not though her dearest wishes could have been realized in an hour. Althea remained absorbed in deep thought and reflection through the first, second, and third Mass; the quiet intervals were all the same to her. She was heedless of those who came in or who went out, as well as of those who knelt around the confessionals, except now and then to wonder, as she chanced to meet some tearful eye, if the world held another heart so lonely, desolate, hopeless as her own. Hopeless? She recalled the day when she had beheld the space of blue in the sky--the hole in the day, Pug-on-a-kesheik, thus termed by her Chippewa friends--which she had taken as a token that her love for Hubert was no sin. She recalled the momentary joy that had animated her as she, in imagination, clasped that love to her heart, as a gain for her loss, as a balm for her bitter sorrow. She remembered how she had even dropped upon her knees in thankfulness to heaven for having given her such a comfort in the midst of her grief. Should _she_ have scruples when ministers of God had lifted up holy hands and sanctified such unions? Thus had her first sense of horror been blunted, and blushless become her keen, womanly shame. Why then, with a sense of the presence of the glorified spirits of her uncle and child, assumed that caressed infatuation, that which she had deemed a higher, nobler love, proportions of gigantic horror? Why had she spat out as gall and wormwood the sweet morsel she had rolled under her tongue? Why, giving up her only joy, trampling down with all her strength and might the one hope of her existence, had she returned to this strange house, wherein she could but beat her breast and cry out "unworthy, unworthy"? Was she the first woman who had mistaken dross for gold; and, finding her error, might not she, like others, fling it aside for the shining ore that lay in her path? Should her hand still grasp the piercing thorn, when the rose bloomed temptingly before her? Thus listened Althea to human sophistry, until God spoke to her through the lips of the Jesuit priest. And he said, slowly and solemnly, grasping in his right hand the emblem of our religion: "And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord, let not the wife depart from her husband. But if she separate, let her remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband; and let not the husband put away his wife."