“My dear child, that is an inspired characterization!” he cried. “You have precisely hit off Miriam Braithwaite. If you can see that, we shall have you riding after her, her squire, upon her knightly errantry to eternity. Admirable, my child! I think you, too, are one who would greatly dare. You are to be a force for God in a world that needs that. And now, are you ready to tell me all about it, and let me give you a hand into the saddle for your own brave riding heavenward?” “Yes, Father. I’d rather not tell you, but if I hadn’t made up my mind to it I wouldn’t have come to see you,” said Cis. “Do you remember that I met you one Sunday coming away from the fire in those tenements in Harvest Street? And that I was with a young man?” “Who was good looking and ready-tongued, whose name was Moore, but who told me that he had left the Church? Naturally I remember finding one of my girls under those influences,” the Jesuit said. “I am engaged to him,” said Cis. “We were to be married on Christmas eve; my birthday is Christmas, and we have a lovely little apartment partly furnished. But--” Cis stopped. “Yes? But, my child? You _were_ to have been married? Past tense? You have learned that you cannot marry?” suggested Father Morley. “Rodney has been true and honorable; he could not bring himself to marry me without telling me,” Cis cried with a piteous look of appeal to the priest to acknowledge this fineness. “He had been married before; he is divorced. But his wife is dreadful; he couldn’t stay married to her. He has an absolute divorce; he can marry again.” “Of course you know that he cannot,” the Jesuit quietly corrected her. “He has the legal right to marry, I’ve no doubt, and we all have the tragic power to cast off our allegiance to God, but he cannot marry as you and I understand marriage. The Church does not demand the continuance of married life when it is outrageously degraded by one of the spouses, but you know that it is not within her power to annul the relation which lasts till death. Rodney Moore must endure his lot under the law which no pope nor council promulgated; God Incarnate declared it solemnly. Laws are for the general good, my child; they often bear hard on the individual, but that does not abrogate them. Moore was married to a nominal Catholic? Both baptized? Married by a priest?”