Father Leadham kept him in check; made him very slow and scrupulous.
Towards his Catholic friends indeed he stood all along in defence of
Laura, an attitude which only made him more sensitive and more vulnerable
in other directions.

Meanwhile his own struggles and discomforts were not few. No strong man
of Helbeck's type endures so complete an overthrow at the hands of
impulse and circumstance as he had done, without going afterwards through
a period of painful readjustment. The new image of himself that he saw
reflected in the astonished eyes of his Catholic companions worked in him
a number of fresh forms of self-torment. His loyalty to Laura, indeed,
and to his own passion was complete. Secretly, he had come to believe,
with all the obstinate ardor of the religious mind, that the train of
events which had first brought Laura into his life, and had then overcome
his own resistance to her spell, represented, not temptation, but a
Divine volition concerning him. No one so impoverished and forlorn as she
in the matters of the soul! But not of her own doing. Was she responsible
for her father? In the mere fact that she had so incredibly come to love
him--he being what he was--there was surely a significance which the
Catholic was free to interpret in the Catholic sense. So that, where
others saw defection from a high ideal and danger to his own Catholic
position, he, with hidden passion, and very few words of explanation even
to his director, Father Leadham, felt the drawing of a heavenly force,
the promise of an ultimate and joyful issue.

At the same time, the sadness of his Catholic friends should find no
other pretext. Upon his fidelity now and here, not only his own eternal
fate, but Laura's, might depend. Devotion to the crucified Lord and His
Mother, obedience to His Church, imitation of His saints, charity to His
poor--these are the means by which the Catholic draws down the grace, the