Lewis Romayne kills a young Frenchman in a duel on the sands near Boulogne and comes home haunted by the dead man’s voice. He is also the owner of Vange Abbey, once Church property, and the patient, smiling Jesuit Father Benwell sets out to convert him, recover the estate and break the hold of Stella, the woman Romayne loves.
Collins’s 1881 novel of religious manipulation, told partly through the priest’s own letters, is a study in slow, polite menace. Download the free EPUB.