The Knight of Malta slept on, as he was to sleep for ever; the priests knelt motionless before the black altar; their quiet, monotonous voices went on with the Penitential Psalms as priests had said them for at least fifteen centuries.

Angela listened till she caught the words and then began to respond again, and once more her thoughts followed broken threads.
Surely, by all she had been taught, her father was in heaven already.
It was not possible that any human being should obey every written and unwritten ordinance of his religion more strictly than he had done ever since she could remember him.

He had been severe, almost to cruelty, but he had been quite as unyieldingly austere in dealing with himself.

He had fasted rigidly, not only when fasts were ordered, but of his free will when others only abstained, he had never begun a day without hearing mass nor a week without confession and communion, he had retired into spiritual retreat in Lent, he had prayed early and late; in his dealings with men, he had not done to others what he would not have had them do to him, he had not said of his neighbour what he would not have said of himself, he had wronged no man; he had given much to charity and more to the 'imprisoned' head of the Church.
He had so lived that no confessor could justly find fault with him, and he had never failed to pray for those in whom he discerned any shortcoming.
Who would condemn such a just person?
Not God, surely.

Therefore when his life had ended so suddenly that morning, his soul had been taken directly to heaven.
Such righteousness as his had venial sins to expiate, what hope was there left for men of ordinary earthly passions and failings?
It was a consolation to think of that, Angela told herself, now that the tide of darkness had ebbed back to the depth of terror whence it had risen; and when at last the long dream slowly dissolved before returning reality the lonely girl's eyes overflowed with natural tears at the thought that her father's motionless lips would never move again, even to reprove her, and that she was looking for the last time on all that earth still held of him who had given her life..