Cranch followed him with anxious eyes. Then he removed the quid of
tobacco from his cheek.
"Just as I reckoned," remarked he, quite audibly. "He's clean gold on
the bed rock after all!"
IV.
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. He fancied, too, that
Cranch had also confessed some trifling deception to him, but what, or
why, he could not remember; so much greater seemed the enormity of his
own transgression.
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