What was he, he thought, that he should explain away nature, and bid a friendless woman defy a power that has more than once overset the reckoning of the world?
He could bid her pray for help and strength, but he found it hard to argue the case with her; for he had to allow that his beautiful penitent was, after all, only experiencing what it might have been foretold that she must feel, and that, as far as he could see, she was struggling bravely against the dangers of her situation.
Corona cried bitterly as she knelt there.

It was a great relief to give way for a time to the whole violence of what she felt.

It may be that in her tears there was a subtle instinctive knowledge that she was weeping for her love as well as for her sin in loving, but her grief was none the less real.

She did not understand herself.

She did not know, as Padre Filippo knew, that her woman's heart was breaking for sympathy rather than for religious counsel.