The first part of that retreat was to him heavenly; but, when it came to making definite plans for the future, then he found himself in cruel doubt. “Oh! if I could have had a Catholic training in early life!” he said to Father John. “It seems to me now that heaven has been within my reach, and has slipped away, without my knowing it. I do not wish to be presuming. I do not try to think of it; the thought haunts me.” “Tell me freely all that is in your mind,” the priest said. “I am here to help you.” Dick Rowan’s head drooped, and he spoke rapidly, as if afraid to speak: “It seems to me, father, that if I had been brought up a strict Catholic--any sort of Catholic--I should have been--” He lifted his face, looked at Father John with eyes that could not bear suspense, and added, “I should have been a priest!” Then, since he found neither astonishment nor displeasure in that face, his distress broke forth. “And now, O God! it is too late!” he said, and wrung his hands. “You think that you had a vocation, my son?” the priest asked calmly. “I believe it!” he answered. “What has my whole life been but a searching and striving after some great and glorious happiness, something different from the common happiness of earth, some one delight which was to be mine here, and still more mine in the world to come? It was always my way to have but one wish, and to expect from its fulfilment what nothing on earth can give. I believe, sir, that when a man has that way of concentrating all his hopes and desires on one object, that object should be God. Otherwise, there is nothing but ruin for him. Such an end was once possible to me, and now it is lost!” Father John laid his hand on the young man’s. “My son,” he said, “it is not lost!” Dick uttered not a word, but gazed steadily into the priest’s face. “I believe that you have a divine vocation.” “You believe that I _had_!” Dick cried out sharply. “I believe that you _have_!” the priest replied. Dick drew a deep breath, and his pale face blushed all over with a sudden delight; but said nothing. “When a man first thinks of choosing God,” the priest said, “he may mistake. But when God chooses a man, and tears away from him every other tie, and sets him in a place where he can see nothing surrounding him but a great solitude filled with God, then there is no mistake. I believe that God chooses you.” “God chooses me!” repeated Dick Rowan, blenching a little, like one dazzled by a great light. “God chooses me!” he said again, and stood up, as if his swelling heart had lifted him. “Then I choose him!” He put his hands over his lifted face, and tears of joy dropped down. Father John, deeply affected, spoke to him, but he did not hear. He was repeating the words of the marriage-service: “‘For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us’--_unite_!” The priest spoke afterward to Edith on the subject. Dick had requested him to tell her and his mother whatever they wished to know.