‘It will serve him right,’ Sybert declared. ‘He ought to have been thinking of other people’s souls instead of his own.’
‘“‘Tis a dangerous thing to play with souls, and matter enough to save one’s own,”’ quoted Marcia.
‘Oh, well,’ he shrugged, ‘I won’t argue, with the poet and the priests both against me; but still——’
‘You think that your speckled soul is exactly as good at other people’s white souls?’
‘It all depends,’ he demurred, ‘upon how they kept theirs white and how I got mine speckled.’
‘Our frate has afforded a long moral,’ she laughed.
‘Ah—and I suspect he didn’t deserve it. He looks, poor devil, as if his heart were still in the world, in spite of the fact that he himself is in the cloister.’
‘In that case,’ she returned, ‘he’s lost the world for nothing, for his prayers will not be answered unless his heart is in them.’
‘There’s a tragedy!’ said Sybert—‘to have lost the world, and then, in spite of it, to turn up in the end with a dusty soul!’
They looked at each other soberly, and then they both laughed.