She nodded her head mechanically.
He went silently and almost sadly from the cell. Then she rose and walked slowly to and fro, with her beautiful but treacherous head upon her breast.
She repeated these words several times—
“I am not allowed to make myself your confessor.”
In spite of the mild tone in which they had been pronounced, her eyes, which lost nothing, had detected a momentary contraction of the eye-brows.
At length she solved the enigma. Her chaplain had thought of the Roman Catholics as he spoke. Of this she felt convinced. He had therefore a prejudice against them.
“Good!” she murmured, “I have discovered that you have a prejudice, and each prejudice in a man’s mind is a crevice in his armour. It will suit me very well to attack him on his weakest side, and it will go hard with me if I do not in the end succeed in my purpose.”
When we signified that William Leverall was neither a fanatic nor a bigot, an exception should have been made in respect to one point—he did hold the profession of the Catholic faith in utter abhorrence. It is not possible to find any one man faultless. High-minded and virtuous as was Mr. Leverall in almost every way, he was nevertheless intolerant in this respect, and yet it appears strange that this young man, who had so often emptied his needy purse, who had passed so many sleepless nights, after witnessing a spectacle of human misery or human sin—that this man, who was really devout, should dislike men who were perhaps as devout as himself, and who tried to win souls as even he himself strove to do.
A bitter and poisonous hatred to Popery had been instilled into his heart by ignorant and prejudiced tutors, and by the controversial books and newspapers which they had placed in his hands. It was the one blemish on his white robe.
When he came the next day he found No. 43 with the sacred volume in her hands, and her eyes filled with an ardent gaze.