What wonder? Oh! blind--infatuate! How could he have hoped to bring her, still untouched, within the circle of his Catholic life, into contact with its secrets and its renunciations, without recoil on her part, without risk of what had actually happened? The strict regulation of every hour, every habit, every thought, at which he aimed as a Catholic--what _could_ it seem to her but a dreary and forbidding tyranny?--to her who had no clue to it, who was still left free, though she loved him, to judge his faith coldly from outside? And when at last he had begun to drop hesitation, to change his tone--then, it was too late! _Tyranny!_ She had used that word once or twice, in that first letter which had reached him on the evening of her flight, and in a subsequent one. Not of anything that had been, apparently--but of that which might be. It had wounded him to the very quick. And yet, in truth, the course of his present thoughts--plainly interpreted--meant little else than this--that if, at the right moment, he had coerced her with success, they might both have been happy. Later on he had seen his own self-judgment reflected in the faces, the consolations, of his few intimate friends. Father Leadham, for instance--whose letters had been his chief support during a period of dumb agony when he had felt himself more than once on the brink of some morbid trouble of brain. "I found her adamant," said Father Leadham. "Never was I so powerless with any human soul. She would not discuss anything. She would only say that she was born in freedom--and free she would remain. All that I urged upon her implied beliefs in which she had not been brought up, which were not her father's and were not hers. Nor on closer experience had she been any more drawn to them--quite the contrary; whatever--and there, poor child! her eyes filled with tears--whatever she might feel towards those who held them. She said fiercely that you had never argued with her or persuaded her--or perhaps only once; that you had promised--this with an indignant look at me--that there should be no pressure upon her. And I could but feel sadly, dear friend, that you only, under our Blessed Lord, could have influenced her; and that you, by some deplorable mistake of judgment, had been led to feel that it was wrong to do so. And if ever, I will even venture to say, violence--spiritual violence, the violence that taketh by storm--could have been justified, it would have been in this case. Her affections were all yours; she was, but for you and her stepmother, alone in the world; and amid all her charms and gifts, a soul more starved and destitute I never met with. May our Lord and His Immaculate Mother strengthen you to bear your sorrow! For your friends, there are and must be consolations in this catastrophe. The cross that such a marriage would have laid upon you must have been heavy indeed."