"She is to send her carriage for me at half past eleven. She was so sure that you would not object that she told me not to send any word."
"It is not well to have her treat so great a departure from rules as a matter of course," the Father answered gravely. "I will send her a note which will show her this. You have permission not to retire at the usual hour."
The carnival season was celebrated at the Clergy House with a meal better than usual, and with some gayety on the part of the young deacons. The light-hearted Southerner improved to the full the permission to talk at dinner, and chatted away with a volubility which seemed to Maurice to indicate a nature too buoyant or too shallow to be deeply stirred. Father Frontford was absent, and there was nothing to throw a shadow of restraint over the feast, the other priests being almost as boyish as the deacons.
"Here's Wynne," the Southerner said laughing, "is as glum as if he were Lent incarnate, come six hours too soon. You must have a good deal on your conscience to be so solemn."
Maurice smiled, trying to shake off his depression.
"It isn't always what is on one's conscience," he retorted, "so much as how tender the conscience is."
"Good! He has you there, Ballentyne," one of the deacons cried.
"Oh, not at all. If a conscience is tender, it must be because it is harrowed up. Now Wynne has probably vexed his so that it is habitually sore."
Maurice was out of the mood of the company, but he tried to answer with a light word. The jesting seemed to him trifling; and his companions, compared to the men he had seen during his stay with Mrs. Staggchase, appeared like boys chattering at boarding-school. He wondered where they had been for their absence; then he remembered that they had all told him, and that he had forgotten. He had had no real interest in them after all, he reflected; and at the thought he reproached himself with egotism and a lack of brotherliness. He glanced at Ashe, and was struck by the paleness of his friend. His look was perhaps followed by Ballentyne, for the latter commented on the downcast aspect of Philip.
"Ashe," the young man said, "looks ten times more doleful than Wynne. What have you fellows been doing? One would think that you had been eating the bitterest of all the apples of Sodom."