Our Lady of Darkness by Bernard Capes — Read

The thunder and the storm roared overhead with a deadened sound; not a breath of all the turmoil could touch the serenity of the star. It burned without a flutter, diffusing, even, the slightest, gentlest radiance throughout the tiny building. Ned, from his position near the door, could make out the whitewashed walls and ceiling; the wee square windows glazed with twilight as sleek and dusky as oxydised silver; the little litter of chairs about the floor; the altar overhung by some indistinguishable dark picture; most suggestively, most spectrally, the very painted statue at whose feet the star itself was glowing.

He stepped softly towards the shrine. A dozen paces brought him almost within touch of it -- and of something else. A woman was crouched against the pedestal of the image, her hands clasped high on the stone, her face buried in the curve of her left arm. In the incessant throb and flash of the lightning through the little windows, he could see the soft heave of her shoulders, the shredded glints of light running up and down her hair as she drew quick breaths like one in terror. Something, in the same moment, convinced him that she was aware of his entrance; that, in the insane relief engendered of company, she was struggling to present as spiritual preoccupation the appearances of extreme fear. If this were so, she fought in vain to save her self-respect. Her collapse, it was evident, had been too abject; to rally from it on the mere prick of pride was an impossibility. Here to her, lost and foundered in hell, had come a first presence of human sympathy.