Her mind went back over her past and found Oscar Wade there. She wondered: Should she confess to him about Oscar Wade? One moment she thought it was possible; the next she knew that she couldn’t. She could not. It wasn’t necessary. For twenty years he had not been part of her life. No. She wouldn’t confess about Oscar Wade. She had been guilty of other sins. She made a careful selection. “I have cared too much for the beauty of this world.... I have failed in charity to my poor girls. Because of my intense repugnance to their sin.... I have thought, often, about—people I love, when I should have been thinking about God.” After that she received the Sacrament. “Now,” he said, “there is nothing to be afraid of.” “I won’t be afraid if—if you would hold my hand.” He held it. And she lay still a long time, with her eyes shut. Then he heard her murmuring something. He stooped close. “This—is—dying. I thought it would be horrible. And it’s bliss.... Bliss.” The priest’s hand slackened, as if at the bidding of some wonder. She gave a weak cry. “Oh—don’t let me go.” His grasp tightened. “Try,” he said, “to think about God. Keep on looking at the crucifix.” “If I look,” she whispered, “you won’t let go my hand?” “I will not let you go.” He held it till it was wrenched from him in the last agony. * * * * * She lingered for some hours in the room where these things had happened. Its aspect was familiar and yet unfamiliar, and slightly repugnant to her. The altar, the crucifix, the lighted candles, suggested some tremendous and awful experience the details of which she was not able to recall. She seemed to remember that they had been connected in some way with the sheeted body on the bed; but the nature of the connection was not clear; and she did not associate the dead body with herself. When the nurse came in and laid it out, she saw that it was the body of a middle-aged woman. Her own living body was that of a young woman of about thirty-two. Her mind had no past and no future, no sharp-edged, coherent memories, and no idea of anything to be done next. Then, suddenly, the room began to come apart before her eyes, to split into shafts of floor and furniture and ceiling that shifted and were thrown by their commotion into different planes. They leaned slanting at every possible angle; they crossed and overlaid each other with a transparent mingling of dislocated perspectives, like reflections fallen on an interior seen behind glass. The bed and the sheeted body slid away somewhere out of sight. She was standing by the door that still remained in position. She opened it and found herself in the street, outside a building of yellowish-grey brick and freestone, with a tall slated spire. Her mind came together with a palpable click of recognition. This object was the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Maida Vale. She could hear the droning of the organ. She opened the door and slipped in.