THE WOMAN AND THE PRIEST
"His mother is taken ill," he said.
Paul, still robed in his alb, was down there at one bound and threw himself on his knees that he might look more closely into his mother's face as she lay stretched on the ground, with her head in a woman's lap and hemmed in by the pressing crowd.
"Mother, mother!"
The face was still and rigid, the eyes half-closed, the teeth clenched in the effort not to cry aloud.
And he knew instantly that she had died of the shock of that same grief, that same terror which he had been enabled to overcome.
And he, too, clenched his teeth that he might not cry aloud when he raised his head; and across the confused mass of the people surging round, his eyes met the eyes of Agnes fixed upon him.
256
