When they had finished their course and ended their canticles of grief

they gathered about the pulpit and the Capuchin got up to preach. He was

a bearded man with a face full of light, almost of frenzy, and a cross

and a rosary hung from his girdle. He spoke of their poverty, their

lost ones, their privations, of the dark hour they were passing through,

and of answers to prayer in political troubles. During this time the

silence was breathless; but when he told them that God had sent their

sufferings upon them for their sins, that they must confess their sins,

in order that their holy mother, the Church, might save them from their

sins, there was a deep hum in the air like the reverberation in a great

shell.

A line of confessional boxes stood in each of the church aisles, and as

the preacher described the sorrows of the man-God, His passion, His

agony, His blood, the women and girls, weeping audibly, got up one by

one and went over to confess. No sooner had one of them arisen than

another took her place, and each as she rose to her feet looked calm and

comforted.

The emotion of the moment was swelling over Roma like a flood. If she

could unburden her heart like that! If she could cast off all the

trouble of her days and nights of pain! One of the confessional boxes

had a penitential rod protruding from it, and going past the front of it

she had seen the face of a priest. It was a soft, kindly, human face.

She had seen it before somewhere--perhaps in the Pope's procession.

At that moment a poor girl with a handkerchief on her head, who had

knelt down crying, was getting up with shining eyes. Roma was shaken by

violent tremors. An overpowering desire had come upon her to confess.

For a moment she held on to a chair, lest she should fall to the floor.

Then by a sudden impulse, in a kind of delirium, scarcely knowing what

she was doing until it was done, she flung herself in the place the girl

had risen from, and with a palpitating heart said in a tremulous voice

through the little brass grating: "Father, I am a great sinner--hear me, hear me!"

The measured breathing inside the confessional was arrested, and the

peaceful face of the priest looked out at the hectic cheeks and blazing

eyes.

"Wait, my daughter, do not agitate yourself. Say the Confiteor."

She tried to speak, but her words were hardly audible or coherent.

"I confess ... I confess ... I cannot, Father."




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