They spoke far into the night, and Seymour determined to announce from the pulpit next Sunday his unshaken conviction of the truth of the Catholic faith, and to take a final leave of his congregation. Young Charteris knew nothing of it. George was baptized the following morning. The week passed by, and the young English cousin was more than ever attracted by the strange, silent, preoccupied manner and the serious, anxious beauty of his girl-companion. A gay young man, with hardly any surface of religion about him, he yet had that deep observative faculty which renders some men's perceptions so acute and true in the field of religion. Half an unbeliever himself for fashion's sake, he was yet quick to detect how really far from unbelief the seemingly cold, doubting girl's heart was; and he smiled to himself as he shrewdly thought how both Puritanism and this present phase of feeling would be rudely shaken when brought face to face with the hot-pressed life of wealthy, bewildering London. But something whispered to him that neither father nor daughter would allow the brilliant world to stand between them and their convictions, whatever those might be. Meanwhile, Charteris romped with little George, who was wisely kept in ignorance as to his new honors, and the days sped fast towards the eventful Sunday which was to have so strange and stormy an ending.
The Saturday previous, Mr. Seymour sat at the window of his library, in his favorite arm-chair, his daughter leaning her head upon his knee, and holding one of his hands clasped to her bosom. For a long time there was a silence; then, like the evening breeze just born among the tree-tops, a faint whisper of conversation began to stir the quiet of the darkened room. The sun was gone down, and the crescent moon was rising in white mistiness behind the shrubbery.
"It was just such a night, Grace," said the minister, "that we sat here with Ashmead more than two years ago—the day we began our new life without your dear mother; and now we have turned another leaf already, and are on the threshold of another new life!"
"Yes, my own darling," said his child; "but it is not without me that you are going to begin it. In any case, I shall never leave you. And if we are parted from little George, why, what can we do but cling more and more to each other?"
"Have you thought, Grace, that it may be a life of toil that we are going to meet?" asked her father earnestly.
"Father dearest, would my mother have shrunk from entering it with you? And do you think I love you less than she did?"
"My brave girl!" he answered, with a soft light coming into his dreamy eyes. Presently he said: "But, Grace, you will have little consolation, little support, for my principles are leading me; but you?"
"My love for you is my guide!" she said fervently.
"Truly, my child, you are even as Ruth, who clung to Naomi for very love, and thereby reaped the reward of faith. God grant you may be led to the same end through my humble instrumentality."
There was a pause. The father, after a few moments' earnest thought, spoke again.