"Well enough. I want to hear more about your confession. You fall back into the bosom of your Church with joy, I suppose?" "Ay!" "And you would never disobey one of her mandates?" "Holy God! no." "Why?" "Why? Because I am a Catholic." "That is not what I asked you. Why are you a Catholic? if I must make myself more plain. Why are you afraid to disobey? Why do you cling to the Church with your back braced against your intelligence? It is hope of future reward, I suppose,--or fear?" "Sure. I want to go to the heaven of the good Catholic." "Do not waste this life, particularly the youth of it, preparing for a legendary hereafter. Granting, for the sake of argument, that this existence is supplemented by another: you have no knowledge of what elements you will be composed when you lay aside your mortal part to enter there. Your power of enjoyment may be very thin indeed, like the music of a band without brass; the sort of happiness one can imagine a human being to experience out of whose anatomy the nervous system has by some surgical triumph been removed, and in whom love of the arts alone exists, abnormally cultivated. But one thing we of earth do know; you do not, but I will tell you; we have a slight capacity for happiness and a large capacity for enjoyment. There is not much in life, God knows, but there is something. One can get a reasonable amount out of it with due exercise of philosophy. Of that we are sure. Of what comes after we are absolutely unsure." She had endeavored to interrupt him once or twice, and did so now, her eyes flashing. "Are you an atheist?" she demanded, abruptly. "Are you not a Catholic?" "I am neither an atheist nor a Catholic. The question of religion has no interest for me whatever. I wish it had none for you." She looked at him sternly. For a moment I thought the Doomswoman would annihilate the renegade. But her face softened suddenly. "I will pray for you," she said, and turned to the man at her right. Estenega's face turned the chalky hue I always dreaded, and he bent his lips to her ear. "Pray for me many times a day; and at other times recall what I said about the relative value of possible and improbable heavens. You are a woman who thinks." "Don Diego," exclaimed Valencia, unable to control her impatience longer, and turning sharply from the caballero who was talking to her in a fiery undertone, "thou hast not spoken to me for ten minutes." "For ten hours, señorita. Thou hast treated me with the scorn and indifference of one weary of homage." She blushed with gratification. "It is thou who hast forgotten me." "Would that I could!" "Dost thou wish to?" "When I am away from thee, or thou talkest to other men,--sure." "It is thy fault if I talk to other men." "You make me feel the Good Samaritan." "But I care not to talk to them."