Then you will have heard of Mistress Marjorie Manners,
no doubt."
"She is an old friend of mine," said Robin, smiling. (The man had a
great personal charm about him.)
"You are very happy in your friends, then," said the other. "I have
never spoken with her myself; but I hear of her continually as assisting
our people--sending them now up into the Peak country, now into the
towns, as the case may be--and never a mistake."
* * * * *
It was delightful to Robin to hear her praised, and he talked of her
keenly and volubly. Exactly that had happened which five years ago he
would have thought impossible; for every trace of his old feeling
towards her was gone, leaving behind, and that only in the very deepest
intimacies of his thought, a sweet and pleasant romance, like the glow
in the sky when the sun is gone down. Little by little that had come
about which, in Marjorie, had transformed her when she first sent him to
Rheims. It was not that reaction had followed; there was no contempt,
either of her or of himself, for what he had once thought of her; but
another great passion had risen above it--a passion of which the human
lover cannot even guess, kindled for one that is greater than man; a
passion fed, trained and pruned by those six years of studious peace at
Rheims, directed by experts in humanity. There he had seen what Love
could do when it could rise higher than its human channels; he had seen
young men, scarcely older than himself, set out for England, as for
their bridals, exultant and on fire; and back to Rheims had come again
the news of their martyrdom: this one died, crying to Jesu as a
home-coming child cries to his mother at the garden-gate; this one had
said nothing upon the scaffold, but his face (they said who brought the
news) had been as the face of Stephen at his stoning; and others had
come back themselves, banished, with pain of death on their returning,
yet back once more these had gone.
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