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And time passed on unflinchingly, and fate was unrelenting. Carmen, after a slight attack of fever, had been sent to some relative in Guanapila, and there she still remained. Doña Isabel’s household consisted only of herself, Herlinda, and the aged priest her cousin Don Francisco de Sales, who though in his dotage still at long intervals read Mass in the chapel, baptized infants, and muttered prayers over the dying or dead, not the less sincere because he who breathed them himself stood so far within the shadow of the tomb. The old man was kindly in his senility, and spent long hours dozing in the chair of the confessional, while penitents whispered in his ear their faults and sins, for which they never failed to obtain absolution, little imagining that the placid mind of the old man, even when by chance he was awake, dwelt far more upon the scenes of his youth than the follies and wickednesses of the present. Sometimes he babbled harmlessly of days long past, even of sights and doings far from clerical; but the priestly habit was second nature, and even if he heeded the confidences reposed in him, in his weakest moments they never escaped his lips. To him Herlinda was free to go and disburden her mind, complying with the regulations of her Church, and seeking relief to her troubled soul. To him, too, Doña Isabel resorted; and these two women with their tales of woe, which as often as repeated escaped his memory, roused faintly within his heart an echo of the pain which he uneasily and confusedly remembered dwelt in the world, from which he was gliding into the peace beyond.