"
III
If it had been a great day for Robin that he should come back to his own
country after six years, and be received in this house of strange
memories; that he should sit upstairs as a priest, and hear confessions
in that very parlour where nearly seven years ago he had sat with
Marjorie as her accepted lover--if all this had been charged, to him,
with emotions and memories which, however he had outgrown them, yet
echoed somewhere wonderfully in his mind; it was no less a kind of
climax and consummation to the girl whose house this was, and who had
waited so long to receive back a lover who came now in so different a
guise.
But it must be made plain that to neither of them was there a thought or
a memory that ought not to be. To those who hold that men are no better,
except for their brains, than other animals; that they are but, after
all, bundles of sense from which all love and aspiration take their
rise--to such the thing will seem simply false. They will say that it
was not so; that all that strange yearning that Marjorie had to see the
man back again; that the excitement that beat in Robin's heart as he had
ridden up the well-remembered slope, all in the dark, and had seen the
lighted windows at the top; that these were but the old loves in the
disguise of piety. But to those who understand what priesthood is, for
him that receives it, and for the soul that reverences it, the thing is
a truism. For the priest was one who loved Christ more than all the
world; and the woman one who loved priesthood more than herself.
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