"Father! Our Lord was not a Jew?" "He was a Jew, my daughter." Hardly any news could more have amazed Doucebelle. "But why then do people use them so harshly?" "Thou hadst better ask the people," answered Bruno, drily. "Father, is it right to use Jews so?" "Thou hadst better ask the Lord." "What does He say, Father?" "He said, speaking to Abraham, the father of them all, `I will bless him that blesseth thee, and curse him that curseth thee.'" "Oh, I am so glad!" cried Doucebelle. "If you please, Father, I could not help loving Belasez: but I tried hard not to do so, because I thought it was wicked. It cannot be wrong to love a Jew, if Christ Himself were one." Bruno did not reply immediately. When he did, it was with a slight quiver in his voice which surprised Doucebelle. "It can never be wrong to love," he said. "But, daughter, let not thy love stop at liking the maid's company. Let it go on till thou canst take it into Heaven." The strangest of all strange ideas was this to Doucebelle. She had been taught that love was always a weakness, and only too frequently a sin. That so purely earthly a thing could be taken into Heaven astonished her beyond measure. "Father!" she said, in a tone of mingled amazement and inquiry. "What now, my daughter?" "People always speak of love as weak, if not wicked." "People often talk of what they do not understand, my child. `God is love.' Think not, therefore, that God resembles a worldly fancy which springs to-day, and fades away to-morrow. His is the heavenly love which can never die, which is ready to sacrifice all things, which so looks to the true welfare of the beloved that it will give thee any earthly suffering rather than see thee sink into perdition by thy sins. This is real love, daughter: and thou canst not sin in giving it to Belasez or to any other." "Yet, Father," said Doucebelle in a puzzled tone, "the religious give up love when they go into the cloister. I do not understand. A Sister of Saint Ursula may not leave her convent, even if her own mother lies dying, and pleads hard to see her. And though some priests do wed,"-- this had not yet, in England, ceased to be the case--"yet people always seem to think the celibate priests more holy, as if that were more in accordance with the will of God. Yet God tells us to love each other. I cannot quite understand." If Doucebelle could have seen, as well as spoken, through the confessional grating, assuredly she would have stopped sooner. For the agony that was working in every line of Father Bruno's face would have been terrible to her to see. But she only thought that it was a long while before he answered her, and she wondered at the hard, constrained tone in his voice.