"My oath! An oath!"
"Certainly. There will be preparation necessary for many days before you can enter. But once a member, a sworn member of that community (I am thinking of our brothers at Oka), you have done with the world. You know the world no longer. It cannot call you."
"But if it did——"
"I say it cannot."
"But I might burst my bonds and seek it!"
"You might, but I do not think you will. Our Church can be loving and restful and harmonious and beautiful (thus the jargon of the heretic) but it can also be masterful and tyrannical and terrible, even cruel, so they say, although I do not go that far myself. And the call of it, the memory of it, the significance of it, the power and majesty and awfulness of it will draw you back. Oh! Have no fear, monsieur! If I may charge myself with your conversion I will stake a great deal, a very great deal indeed, on the chances of your absolute and final surrender, with even temporary reversion an impossibility. You will decide quickly then, monsieur, although we do not ask for haste. We can wait."
And with emphasis in his thrilling voice the priest murmured again:
"The Church of Rome can always wait."
This statement and the other predictions concerning Ringfield were verified in course of time, for without seeing Pauline again he made instant preparation for the solemn and extraordinary step which closed his career in the world as we know it. Poor Pauline! The promise given to Henry Clairville on his death-bed was kept, it is needless to say, but only half kept, as she did not admit the child to her confidence, nor show it affection, and only kept at all because she could not help herself. Very gradually her strength returned after nearly two years of invalidism, and then the streaks of grey in her hair, her altered figure and expression, told part of her story to those who thought they knew all. Who at St. Ignace could enter into her feelings or offer her consolation?
"No one could be sorrier than I am for doing the young lady an injustice," was the loudly expressed opinion of Enderby. "Not but what there was grounds. There is, they tell me, often a more striking likeness between cousins, aunts, and such, than between mother and daughter and father and son. What I done any one might have done, and what I said I've long ago took back."
These remarks were made with characteristic magnanimity at the annual Hawthorne festival, a couple of years after the picnic tea at which Ringfield had assisted; held this year on 20th October, a warm sun flooded the valley, the women wore their lightest dresses, and Mrs. Abercorn was particularly gay in a flowered muslin, dating from the time of William the Fourth, with honi soit qui mal y pense on a blue ribbon worked into the design of the material; a garden hat was tied under her chin and a fur cape lay over her shoulders. No one was present from St. Ignace, but a good deal of talk might have been heard which signified that Miss Clairville was still the interesting central figure of the neighbourhood.