"And what you said to me afterwards, about the child—and doubt? I stayed long in the chapel that night. It was borne in upon me, with a certainty I shall never lose, that all was well with your poor father. Our Blessed Lord has revealed to him in that other life what an invincible ignorance hid from him here."
He spoke with a beautiful simplicity, like a man dealing with all that was most familiarly and yet sacredly real to his daily mind and thought.
She trembled. Words and ideas of the kind were still all strange and double-edged to her—suggesting on the one side the old feelings of contempt and resistance, on the other a new troubling of the waters of the heart.
She leant her brow against the back of the old sofa on which they were sitting. "And—and no prayers for me?" she said huskily.
"Dear love!—at all times—in all places—at my downsitting and mine uprising," he answered—every word an adoration.
She was silent for a moment, then she dashed the tears from her eyes.
"All the same, I shall never be a Catholic," she repeated resolutely; "and how can you marry an unbeliever?"
"My Church allows it—under certain conditions."
Her mind flew over the conditions. She had heard them named on one or two occasions during the preceding months. Then she turned away, dreading his eye.
"Suppose I am jealous of your Church and hate her?"