“Oh, yes; I remember now. That’s what the Bishop said. Isn’t it strange,” she went on slowly, “how he seems to come into everything we do. How he saved my Daddy Tom’s life that time at Fort Fisher. And how he came here that night when Daddy was hurt. And how he picked us up and turned us around and sent me off to convent. And now how he seems to come into all this.
“Everybody calls him the Shepherd of the North,” she went on. “I wonder if he comes into the lives of all the people that way. At the convent everybody seems to think of him as belonging to them personally. I resented it at first, because I thought I had more reason to know him 73 than anybody. But I found that everybody felt the same way.”
“He’s just like the Catholic Church,” said Jeffrey suddenly, and a little sharply; “he comes into everything.”
“Why, Jeffrey,” said Ruth in surprise, “what do you know about the Church?”
“I know,” he answered. “I’ve read some. And I’ve had to deal a lot with the French people up toward French Village. And I’ve talked with their priest up there. You know you have to talk to the priest before it’s any use talking to them. That’s the way with the Catholic Church. It comes into everything. I don’t like it.”
He sat looking across the pool for a moment, while Ruth quietly studied the stubborn, settling lines of his face. She saw that a few months had made a big change in the boy and playmate that she had known. He was no longer the bright-faced, clear-eyed boy. His face was turning into a man’s face. Sharp, jagged lines of temper and of harshness were coming into it. It showed strength and doggedness and will, along with some of the dour grimness of his fathers. She did not dislike the change altogether. But it began to make her a little timid. She was quick to see from it that there would be certain limits beyond which she could not play with this new man that she found.
“It’s all right to be religious,” he went on argumentatively. 74 “Mother’s religious. And Aunt Letty’s just full of it. But it don’t interfere with their lives. It’s all right to have a preacher for marrying or dying or something like that; and to go to hear him if you want to. But the Catholic Church comes right in to where those people live. It tells them what to do and what to think about everything. They don’t dare speak without looking back to it to find out what they must say. I don’t like it.”
“Why, Jeffrey, I’m a Catholic!”
“I knew it!” he said stubbornly. “I knew it! I knew there was something that had changed you. And I might have known it was that.”
“That’s funny!” said the girl, breaking in quickly. “When you came I was just wondering to myself why it had not seemed to change me at all. I think I was half disappointed with myself, to think that I had gone through a wonderful experience and it had left me just the same as I was before.”