"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. "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. She leant her brow against the back of the old sofa on which they were sitting. "And--and no prayers for me?" she said huskily. "Dear love!--at all times--in all places--at my downsitting and mine uprising," he answered--every word an adoration. She was silent for a moment, then she dashed the tears from her eyes. "All the same, I shall never be a Catholic," she repeated resolutely; "and how can you marry an unbeliever?" "My Church allows it--under certain conditions." Her mind flew over the conditions. She had heard them named on one or two occasions during the preceding months. Then she turned away, dreading his eye. "Suppose I am jealous of your Church and hate her?"