That night Father Pedro dreamed a strange dream.

How much of it was reality, how long it lasted, or when he awoke from it, he could not tell.

The morbid excitement of the previous day culminated in a febrile exaltation in which he lived and moved as in a separate existence.
This is what he remembered.

He thought he had risen at night in a sudden horror of remorse, and making his way to the darkened church had fallen upon his knees before the high altar, when all at once the acolyte's voice broke from the choir, but in accents so dissonant and unnatural that it seemed a sacrilege, and he trembled.

He thought he had confessed the secret of the child's sex to Cranch, but whether the next morning or a week later he did not know.