On the one side there was her human love for the
lad who had wooed her--as hot as fire, and as pure--and on the other
that keen romance that had made her pray that he might be a priest. This
second desire had come to her, as sharp as a voice that calls, when she
had heard of the apostasy of his father; it had seemed to her the
riposte that God made to the assault upon His honour. The father would
no longer be His worshipper? Then let the son be His priest; and so the
balance be restored. And so the maid had striven with the two loves
that, for once, would not agree together (as did the man in the Gospels
who wished to go and bury his father and afterwards to follow his
Saviour); she had not dared to say a word to the lad of anything of this
lest it should be her will and not God's that should govern him, for she
knew very well what a power she had over him; but she had prayed God,
and begged Robin to pray too and to listen to His voice; and now she had
her way, and her heart was broken with it, she said:
"And when I think," she wailed across her mother's knees, "of what it is
to be a priest; and of the life that he will lead, and of the death that
he may die!... And it is I ... I ... who will have sent him to it.
Mother!..."
Mrs. Manners was bethinking herself of a cordial just then, and how she
knew old Ann would be coming presently, and was listening with but half
an ear.
"It's not you, my dear," she said, patting the head beneath her hands.
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