“Tell me freely all that is in your mind,” the priest said. “I am here to help you.”
Dick Rowan’s head drooped, and he spoke rapidly, as if afraid to speak: “It seems to me, father, that if I had been brought up a strict Catholic—any sort of Catholic—I should have been—” He lifted his face, looked at Father John with eyes that could not bear suspense, and added, “I should have been a priest!”
Then, since he found neither astonishment nor displeasure in that face, his distress broke forth. “And now, O God! it is too late!” he said, and wrung his hands.
“You think that you had a vocation, my son?” the priest asked calmly.
“I believe it!” he answered. “What has my whole life been but a searching and striving after some great and glorious happiness, something different from the common happiness of earth, some one delight which was to be mine here, and still more mine in the world to come? It was always my way to have but one wish, and to expect from its fulfilment what nothing on earth can give. I believe, sir, that when a man has that way of concentrating all his hopes and desires on one object, that object should be God. Otherwise, there is nothing but ruin for him. Such an end was once possible to me, and now it is lost!”
Father John laid his hand on the young man’s. “My son,” he said, “it is not lost!”
Dick uttered not a word, but gazed steadily into the priest’s face.
“I believe that you have a divine vocation.”
“You believe that I had!” Dick cried out sharply.
“I believe that you have!” the priest replied.