She wore an expression of infinite sadness, as though she knew well the connection between me and the picture, and as if the briar-spray in her hand were only a miniature of the thorn-bush in which yonder martyr lay.
In the lonely stillness of the church a panic came over me, an inexpressible terror of unseen powers, and I fled precipitately.
When I got outside, I discovered that I had lost Susanna's blue cross.
It could only be in the church on the step where I had been sitting.

At that moment, while my heart was still throbbing with terror, I would not have gone back again into the church for anything in the world--except Susanna's blue cross.

I found it, when I carefully searched the floor where I had been sitting.
The second time during these years that my nervous system gave evidence of its unsoundness was late in the autumn, a month or two before I was to go home.
A peasant, who had gone in to see the minister, had fastened his horse, which was wall-eyed, to the churchyard wall.

I began to look at it; and the recollection of its dead, expressionless glance followed me for the rest of the day.

It seemed to me as if its eyes, instead of looking out, looked inwards into a world invisible to me, and as if it would be quite natural if it forgot to obey the reins, and left the ordinary highway for the road to Hades, along which the dead are travelling.
With this in my mind, I sat that afternoon in the parsonage where people were talking of all kinds of things, and there suddenly appeared before me a home face, pale and with a strained look, and soon after I could see that the man to whom it belonged was striving desperately to climb up from the raging surf on to a rock.