"I live like a hermit. My sister is in the first year of her widowhood and very delicate."
"I see." The Jesuit hesitated, then said, smiling, in the tone of one who makes a venture: "The Bishop and I allowed ourselves to discuss these cloistered ways of yours the other day. We thought you would forgive us as a pair of old friends."
"I know," was the somewhat quick interruption, "the Bishop is of Manning's temper in these things. He believes in acting on and with the Protestant world—in our claiming prominence as citizens. It was to please him that I joined one or two committees last year—that I went to the hunt ball——"
Then, suddenly, in a very characteristic way, Helbeck checked his own flow of speech, and resumed more quietly: "Well, all that——"
"Leaves you of the same opinion still?" said the Jesuit, smiling.
"Precisely. I don't belong to my neighbours, nor they to me. We don't speak the same language, and I can't bring myself to speak theirs. The old conditions are gone, I know. But my feeling remains pretty much, what that of my forefathers was. I recognise that it is not common nowadays—but I have the old maxim in my blood: 'Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.'"
"There is none which has done us more deadly harm in England," cried the Jesuit. "We forget that England is a baptized nation, and is therefore in the supernatural state."
"I remind myself of it very often," said Helbeck, with a kind of proud submission; "and I judge no man. But my powers, my time, are all limited. I prefer to devote them to the 'household of faith.'"
The two men walked on in silence for a time. Presently Father Leadham's face showed amusement, and he said:
"Certainly we modern converts have a better time of it than our predecessors! The Bishop tells me the most incredible things about the old feeling towards them in this Vicariate. And wherever I go I seem to hear the tale of the old priest who thanked God that he had never received anyone into the Church. Everybody has met someone who knew that old fellow! He may be a myth—but there is clearly history at the back of him!"