"In that case you must keep your promise, and as a true woman she will think all the more of you. But there is one thing I wanted to ask. Have you anything to keep a wife upon besides your salary as surgeon? You see how practical I am."
"Thank the Holy Virgin, I have. My father left me independent of any income I may receive from the army."
"One other point, Doctor. As your confidant you must excuse my queries. How can you, a Roman Catholic, expect so staunch a Churchwoman as Maud Maxwell to consent to be your wife?"
"Truly a serious question—and one that I have not forgotten, but do you know that religion is much more to a woman than it is to a man?"
"It ought not to be."
"That is true, though I am sorry to say it was not so in my mother's case. My father was a French seigneur of Lower Canada and a Catholic, while my mother was a Scotch Presbyterian. Why she joined my father's Church I could never tell, except that my father was a dominant man, and that there was no Presbyterian church within fifty miles of where we lived. Consequently, my brothers and sisters and myself were all brought up in the Catholic faith. What is more, Agatha, my sister, being disappointed in love, entered a cloister, and is now a nun in a Montreal convent."
"That is sad."
"Perhaps it is. Yet I would not say a word against the sisterhood or the Romish Church. They are both maligned. But I am sorry that my only sister, a bright and beautiful girl, should be hopelessly consigned to the life of the cloister."
"I appreciate your feelings, Doctor. But will this influence your own future?"
"It may. A sensible man should look to the future as well as the present. If Maud Maxwell should ever become my wife, I would never ask her to renounce her faith; I might even be willing to espouse Protestantism, for which so many of my mother's ancestors died."