"I had no idea you'd mind the sort of—togs a fellow went about in! You, who are going—you told me in your last letter! to take a vow of poverty and all the rest!..."
She laughed and patted the brown hand.
"But you aren't going to take a vow of poverty.... You will be independent.... You will have everything—I hope you will have everything; that goes to make Life pleasant, and all the other things that make it—precious.... I am very ambitious for you, Carolan!"
He laughed rather roughly.
"Ambition in the cap and cape of a postulant! What would the Mistress of the Novices say to that?"
The face framed in the triple row of white frills was very pure and tender.
"She would say that there are more kinds of ambition, than one. I am ambitious that my brother should be spoken of among men—as a man who in the whole course of his career was never once ashamed to own himself a Catholic, and to prove not only in words, but in deeds—his loyalty to his Master in the face of the world! You understand me, don't you?"
He answered her in an embarrassed, awkward way, and with a look that evaded hers.
"Of course! You mean—you'd like me to be the kind of fellow who goes regularly to Mass, and receives the Blessed Sacrament on all the Feasts of Obligation! Well, I can't boast of being quite as scrupulous as that! But at any rate I have—ringed in with the late-comers—at Christmas and Easter and Whitsuntide...." He added, "Not that I should have been thought priggish if I'd gone oftener.... Of course the bulk of the students at Schwärz-Brettingen were Lutheran Protesants. But about one-third were Catholics, I should think."
"And were all of them late-comers—ringing in at the last minute?"