I could not do as Father Dan advised, being now enmeshed in the threads of innumerable impulses unknown to myself, and therefore firmly convinced that Martin's story was not only true, but a part of the whole sordid business whereby a husband was being bought for me.
With this thought I went about all day, asking myself what I could do even yet, but finding no answer until nine o'clock at night, when, immediately after supper (we lived country fashion), Aunt Bridget said:
"Now then, off to bed, girls. Everybody must be stirring early in the morning."
And then I slipped upstairs to my room, and replied to Father Dan.
Never had I written such a letter before. I poured my whole heart on to the paper, saying what marriage meant to me, as the Pope himself had explained it, a sacrament implying and requiring love as the very soul of it, and since I did not feel this love for the man I was about to marry, and had no grounds for thinking he felt it for me, and being sure that other reasons had operated to bring us together, I begged Father Dan, by his memory of my mother, and his affection for me, and his desire to see me good and happy, to intervene with my father and the Bishop, even at this late hour, and at the church door itself to stop the ceremony.
It was late before I finished, and I thought the household was asleep, but just as I was coming to an end I heard my father moving in the room below, and then a sudden impulse came to me, and with a new thought I went downstairs and knocked at his door.
"Who's there?" he cried. "Come in."
He was sitting in his shirt sleeves, shaving before a looking-glass which was propped up against two ledgers. The lather on his upper lip gave his face a fierce if rather grotesque expression.
"Oh, it's you," he said. "Sit down. Got to do this to-night—goodness knows if I'll have time for it in the morning."
I took the seat in the ingle which Father Dan occupied on the night of my birth. The fire had nearly burnt out.