“Do you like my home?” she said, in her level, toneless voice. The labour of lifting it seemed always constitutionally beyond her.
I clasped my hands. “O, madam,” I said, “I could be a very good Catholic here!”
She smiled, in a surprised way, then looked grave. I waited in a fever of expectation for her to speak again. I had already decided that I would wish to be adopted like Patience, in whom I seemed to foresee a little adoring vassal, so welcome after my own long slavery, and that I must be adroit to gain my point. Brighthelmston, with its questionable potentialities, had darkened in contrast with this paradise. I felt even that it would not be good for me to return there; that I was destined for a virtuous, if not a devout life. It is no contradiction that I had not thought so an hour before. Our moral development is intermittent. Its phases of growth are inspirations of adaptation to circumstance. A fever made of Francis of Assisi a saint out of a profligate. These high lawns had revealed to me the pit from which I had escaped.
Lady Sophia looked very sweet and grave.
“Or anywhere, I hope,” she said. “Faith is not a question of surroundings.”
I was not so sure of that; but I held my tongue, hanging my head.
“Let me see your face,” she insisted, and put her thin hand under my chin.
“It is a pretty and an innocent one,” she declared. “How came you, child, in the position in which Father Pope found you?”
I told her how I had been stolen by the sweep, and had escaped from him rather than seem to concur in the violence offered to my religion.
“It was an ingenious and a courageous act,” she said, gently kindling; “was it not, Father?”