That's what I'm here for, that's why I'm a priest. I am Our Lord's chosen representative here on earth, I listen on His behalf, I even forgive on His behalf. And, wee Meggie, there is nothing in God's universe He and I cannot find it in our hearts to forgive. You must tell me what the matter is, my love, because if anyone can help you, 1 c. As long as I live I'll try to help you, watch over you. If you like, a sort of guardian angel, better by far than that chunk of marble above your head." He took a breath and leaned forward. "Meggie, if you love me, tell me!"

Her hands gripped one another. "Father, I'm dying! I've got cancer!" First came a wild desire to laugh, a great surge of uproarious anticlimax; then he looked at the thin blue skin, the wasting of her little arms, and there came an awful longing to weep and cry, scream of its unfairness to the roof of heaven. No, Meggie wouldn't imagine this out of nothing; there had to be a valid reason.

"How do you know, dear heart?"

It took her a long time to say it, and when she did he had to bend his head right down to her lips in an unconscious parody of the confessional pose, hand

shielding his face from her eyes, finely modeled ear presented for the sullying.

"It's six months, Father, since it started. I get the most awful pains in my tummy, but not like a bilious attack, and-oh, Father!-a lot of blood runs out of my bottom!"

His head reared back, something which had never happened inside the confessional; he stared down at her shamed bent head with so many emotions assaulting him that he could not marshal his wits. An absurd, delicious relief; an anger at Fee so great he wanted to kill her; awed admiration for such a little thing as her, to bear so much so well; and a ghastly, all-pervasive embarrassment.

He was as much a prisoner of the times as she was. The cheap girls in every town he had known from Dublin to Gillanbone would deliberately come into the confessional to whisper their fantasies to him as actual happenings, concerned with the only facet of him which interested them, his manhood, and not willing to admit it lay beyond their power to arouse it. They muttered of men violating every orifice, of illicit games with other girls, of lust and adultery, one or two of superior imagination even going so far as to detail sexual relations with a priest. And he would listen totally unmoved save for a sick contempt,