"Oh, I can't explain you!" She raised her shoulders, but her face
trembled. "I never tried."

"Let me show you how. I went because you were here."

"And you were afraid--that you might love me? Was it--such a hard fate?"
She turned her head away.

"What have I to offer you?" he said passionately; "poverty--an elderly
lover--a life uncongenial to you."

She slipped a hand nearer to him, but her face clouded a little.

"It's the very strangest thing in the world," she said deliberately,
"that we should love each other. What can it mean? I hated you when I
came, and meant to hate you. And"--she sat up and spoke with an emphasis
that brought the colour back into her face--"I can never, never be a
Catholic."

He looked at her gravely.

"That I understand."

"You know that I was brought up apart from religion, altogether?"

His eye saddened. Then he raised her hand and kissed it. The pitying
tenderness of the action almost made her break down. But she tried to
snatch her hand away.