“What does she dream, Dan?” asked the old priest softly.
“I suppose she’d get out of them if she were home where things are natural like,” said Dan; “but now she sits up there in the Little Sisters’ dreaming that I’m going to be a priest,—a rough-and-tumble fellow like me!”
“Stranger things than that have happened, Dan,” said Father Mack, quietly. “I was a rough-and-tumble fellow myself.”
“You, Father!” exclaimed Dan.
“The ‘roughest-and-tumblest’ kind,” said Father Mack, his worn face brightening into a smile that took away twenty years at least. “I ran away to sea, Dan, leaving a gentle mother to break her heart for me. When I came back” (the old face shadowed again) “she was gone. Ah, God’s ways are full of mystery, Dan! I think it was that made me a priest.”
Father Mack was silent for a moment. His dim eyes turned to the sunset, where the cloud curtains were swept asunder, the pillared gates a glory of crimson and gold. Something in his old friend’s face hushed Dan’s questioning until Father Mack spoke again.
“That was a long time ago,—a long time ago. But the thought of it makes me understand about Aunt Winnie, Dan, and how hard it is to give you up. Still—still—even of old God asked the firstlings of the flock. Sacrifice! sacrifice! It is the way to heaven, Dan. Heart, hopes, tears, blood,—always sacrifice.” And again the old speaker paused as if in troubled thought. “How soon must you make your choice, Dan?” he asked at length.
“My choice? About leaving, you mean, Father? Oh, Pete Patterson doesn’t want me until the fall. And I haven’t any place to go this summer, if I give up now. Father Regan is going to send us off to-morrow with Brother Bart for a summer at the seashore.”
“A summer at the seashore! Ah, good, good,—very good!” said Father Mack, his old face brightening. “That will give us time to think, to pray, Dan. A summer! Ah, God can work wonders for those who trust Him in a summer, Dan! Think what He does with the seed, the grain, the fruit. It is not well to move or to choose hastily when we are in the dark as to God’s will. So say nothing about all this to any one as yet, Dan,—nothing this summer.”
“I won’t, Father,” agreed Dan.