"You speak English?" he asked.

And yet the mind of the priest was somehow strangely troubled. Perhaps his inner consciousness apprehended a change in Erna that was so subtile as not to be tangible to the outward sense. Certain it is that a doubt so vague that he could not have defined it even to himself, but so real that it filled him with a shadowy fear of coming evil, weighed upon the soul of Father Christopher whenever he thought of his mistress and of the effect which this marriage had wrought upon her character.