"It was papa's doing, and I shall never blame him--never!"

"I have been in Belgium lately," he said, holding the hand close, "at a
great Catholic town--Louvain--where I was educated. I went to an old
priest I know, and to a Reverend Mother who has sent me Sisters once or
twice, and I begged of them both--prayers for your father's soul."

She stared. The painful tears rushed into her eyes.

"I thought that--for you--that was all sure and settled long ago."

"I don't think you know much about us, little heretic! I have prayed for
your father's soul at every Mass since--you remember that Rosary service
in April?"

She nodded.

"And what you said to me afterwards, about the child--and doubt? I stayed
long in the chapel that night. It was borne in upon me, with a certainty
I shall never lose, that all was well with your poor father. Our Blessed
Lord has revealed to him in that other life what an invincible ignorance
hid from him here."

He spoke with a beautiful simplicity, like a man dealing with all that
was most familiarly and yet sacredly real to his daily mind and thought.

She trembled. Words and ideas of the kind were still all strange and
double-edged to her--suggesting on the one side the old feelings of
contempt and resistance, on the other a new troubling of the waters of
the heart.