"You, Son Gaspard? Ah! I see, I see! Satan hath desired to sift thee as wheat, but I have prayed to the Father for thee. There, on the Grey Leap, I prayed; He has ventured his life to repair my fault, give me his life, O Father, spare him and give me his Greater Life. And so it shall be. I know it by faith, and if we could not know by faith, how could we live at all? Tell me your trouble, my son. Am I not Father Paul, God's Priest, and your friend? Confess yourself, and remember you speak not to me, but in the secret ear of God." And I spoke. Kneeling between his knees as he sat upon a settle, I told him all from the beginning. What passed between us at the first is for no man's curiosity. Then, that being done with, and we back in the world again, the world in which men must use their lame wits and feeble understandings as best they can, I, tramping up and down the room, cried, "But what next? I cannot see what next; it is all dark." "No, no," said Paul, "not all dark, never all dark. No, my son, no; the Lord God never leaves a soul in the All Dark. Somewhere, somewhere, there is a gleam, and that gleam is an inspiration. Is it love? Follow it, my son, follow it. Duty? Then follow duty. A clean conscience? In God's name, follow it wherever it leads. Who am I to say more? The gleam is the one divine thing in us, therefore follow the gleam, follow it, follow it." "It is easy for you, sitting there, to say so," and pausing in my walk, I stood over him; "but the arm of that cunning devil in Plessis can reach, as he told me, from Arragon to England, and from the verge of the Empire to the sea in the west. Gleam? There is no gleam." "There is your oath, my son." "My oath? An oath taken in blindness is no oath." But Brother Paul shook his head. "A Christian man's oath is the honour of his soul. When you swore your oath at Plessis there was always an alternative you could follow." "To return?" "To return," he repeated. "But--that is death?" "I said it was the honour of the soul. The ancient tongue has a motto, _Prius mori quam fidem fallere_. Sooner die than break faith--faith with God and all that is best in ourselves, faith with that unhappy woman who for no fault of hers, for no cause but that she loved you, stands to-day in your place. Were you Paulus and I Son Gaspard, I would go back to Plessis--and die. Not that I dare to judge for you." "I cannot see it," I cried, the love of life and the love of Suzanne both strong within me. Was her rose not buckled to my bonnet? "Father! Father! Is there a God at all that we men are put to such straits?" Priest though he was, he did not so much as utter a rebuke, but, rising, he laid his hands upon my shoulders as he had done almost at the first.