Page:Dellada - The Woman and the Priest, 1922.djvu/225

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THE WOMAN AND THE PRIEST

is your idea! Last night you said, 'Let us go away, we will get married and I will work.' Didn't you say that? Didn't you? But to-night you come and talk to me instead about God and sacrifice. So now there is an end of it all: we will part. But you, I say it again, you must leave the village this very night, I never wish to see you again. If tomorrow morning you go once more into our church to say Mass I shall go there too, and from the altar steps I shall say to the people: 'This is your saint, who works miracles by day and by night goes to unprotected girls to seduce them!'"

He tried in vain to shut her mouth with his hand, and as she kept on crying aloud, "Go, go!" he seized her head and pressed it to his breast, glancing with alarm at the closed doors. And he remembered his mother's words and her voice, mysterious in the darkness: "The old priest sat beside me and said, I will soon turn both you and your son out of the parish."

"Agnes, Agnes, you are mad!" he groaned,

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