Alas, alas!--what ill-luck! They walked together to the road--Eleanor first imagining, then rejecting one sentence after another.

At last she said, a little piteously: 'It is so strange, Father--that you should be here!' The priest did not answer immediately.

He walked with a curiously uncertain gait.

Eleanor noticed that his soutane was dusty and torn, and that he was unshaven.

The peculiar and touching charm that had once arisen from the contrast between the large-limbed strength which he inherited from a race of Suabian peasants, and an extraordinary delicacy of feature and skin, a childish brightness and sweetness in the eyes, had suffered eclipse.