The Prioress had placed her chair opposite the Bishop. She was very pale, and her lips trembled. She made so great an effort to speak with calmness, that her voice sounded stern and hard.
"Why this talk of earthly loves, my Lord Bishop, in a place where all earthly love has been renounced and forgotten?"
The Bishop, seeing those trembling lips, ignored the hard tones, and answered, very tenderly, with a simple directness which scorned all evasion:
"Because, my daughter, I am here to plead for Hugh."
CHAPTER XXVII
THE WOMAN AND HER CONSCIENCE
"For Hugh?" said the Prioress. And then again, in low tones of incredulous amazement, "For Hugh! What know you of Hugh, my lord?"
The Bishop looked steadfastly at the Prioress, and replied with exceeding gravity and earnestness:
"I know that in breaking your solemn troth to him, you are breaking a very noble heart; and that in leaving his home desolate, you are robbing him not only of his happiness but also of his faith. Men are apt to rate our holy religion, not by its theories, but by the way in which it causeth us to act in our dealings with them. If you condemn Hugh to sit beside his hearth, through the long years, a lonely, childless man, you take the Madonna from his home; if you take your love from him, I greatly fear lest you should also rob him of his belief in the love of God. I do not say that these things should be so; I say that we must face the fact that thus they are. And remember—between a man and woman of noble birth, each with a stainless escutcheon, each believing the other to be the soul of honour, a broken troth is no light matter."
"I did not break my troth," said the Prioress, "until I believed that
Hugh had broken his. I had suffered sore anguish of heart and
humiliation of spirit, over the news of his marriage with his cousin
Alfrida, ere I resolved to renounce the world and enter the cloister."