THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY
and of the storm of the dies irae where the individual is lost among the millions of the dead, features grow dim and traits fade. At a little more than half the journey, at the mud church of San Luis Rey she slipped in and knelt against a pillar to rest. She wandered through her memory, searching for the faces of her two. She waited for some emotion to appear. “But I feel nothing,” she whispered to herself. “I have no heart. I am a poor meaningless woman, that’s all. I am shut out. I have no heart. Look, I won’t try and think of anything; let me just rest here.” And scarcely had she paused when again that terrible incommunicable pain swept through her, the pain that could not speak once to Uncle Pio and tell him of her love and just once offer her courage to Jaime in his sufferings. She started up wildly: “I fail everybody,” she cried. “They love me and I fail them.” She returned to the farm and carried for a year the mood of her self-despair. One day she heard by accident that the wonderful Abbess had lost
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