"This'll pass, me dear child. Many a poor soul before ye has known what it is to falter by the wayside. But courage, Sister, ye can conquer this weakness with God's help. You're in no trouble about your faith, now are ye?"
Had Alex been able to formulate her thoughts clearly, she might have told him that it had long since become a matter of supreme unimportance to her whether or no she still possessed that which he termed her faith. As a fact, the beliefs which could alone have made the convent life endurable to her, had never struck more than the most shallow of roots into her consciousness. Perhaps the only belief which had any real hold upon her was the one that she had gradually formed upon her experience of the living—that God was a Superior Being who must be propitiated by the sacrifice of all that one held dear, lest He strike it from one.
She looked dimly at Father Farrell, and shook her head, because she was afraid of his anger if she owned to the utter insecurity of her hold upon any religious convictions.
"That's right, that's right," he said hastily. "I felt sure ye were a good child at bottom. Now would ye like to make a good general Confession, and I'll give ye absolution, and ye can start again?"
Some hint of inflexibility in the last words roused Alex to a final, frantic bid for liberty.
"It's no use—it won't do for me to begin again. I can't stay on. If I can't get released from my vows I'll—I'll run away."
Then there was a long silence.
When the priest spoke again, however, his voice held more of meditative speculation than of the anger which she feared.
"Supposing I could arrange it for ye—I don't say I could, mind, but it might be done, if good reasons were shown—what would ye say to another religious order altogether? It may be that this life is unsuited to ye—there have been such cases. I know a holy Carmelite nun who was in quite another order for nearly fifteen years, before she found out where the Lord really wanted her. Are ye one of those, maybe?"
"No," spoke Alex, almost sullenly. The conflict was wearing her out, and she was conscious only of a blind, unreasoning instinct that if she once gave ground, she would find herself for ever bound to the life which had become unendurable to her.