Who shall deny the healing virtue of confession now and then? The temptation to confess now was irresistible to Jerome; to Somerville it suddenly gave the power he so ardently desired; suddenly, and far more easily than he had expected. It was not the first case, by many, of remorse gone mad, which he had had to deal with. A dullard, an unsympathetic nature might have driven the patient to worse lengths. Somerville was neither the one nor the other, and by this time he thoroughly understood the nature he had to deal with–the hot southern impetuousness which raged and rebelled under misfortune, which met grief as a hated foe, to be wrestled with–not as a fact inseparable from life itself, to be accepted; the half-hysterical remorse, the stinging, intolerable sense of humiliation and degradation which so tortured the man who loved to see things smooth, and to find circumstances bland. Somerville’s hand was at once light and firm. Walking with Wellfield to the Abbey, he heard out the whole miserable story; the confession of all that had happened from the time Jerome had left Wellfield for Frankfort, up to this very day, when he had gone into Nita’s room and found her old dog watching beside her couch. It was an opportunity which the priest did not fail to turn in a masterly manner to the very best advantage. Already he saw the Abbey and its wealth once more in the hands of firm adherents of the Roman Catholic Church–of the Society of Jesus. Had not the child been, by his own hand, baptised into that Church? He distracted Jerome’s mind from its purely emotional pain, by reminding him that Nita and her father had left things behind them–the one land and money, the other a life–for the disposal of which things he alone was now answerable. He found Wellfield only too ready to own that he wanted guidance, only too eager to clasp the first helping hand extended to him. Somerville remained all night at the Abbey, with every hour binding his silken chain more firmly and more intricately around his–penitent. He sent word to the Superior at Brentwood on what mission he was engaged, and during the long vigil he kept with the broken man, he succeeded in the most vital part of the work which he had set himself. He convinced Wellfield that he was indispensable to his peace of mind, and he promised not to desert him. In the morning, before leaving for Brentwood, after promising that he would return again, Somerville, passing through the drawing-room, found Avice standing there, with the motherless baby in her arms. She held it tenderly, with a motherly, protecting gesture, and looked down with love and pity into its face. He paused, smiling, and said: ‘I have forgotten to ask how your charge goes on, Miss Wellfield?’ ‘Both nurse and the doctor say he is going to thrive, father. Look into his dear little face–he looks rosy and healthy. Poor little darling, how I love him! and how I wish Jerome would take to him!’