She leaned forward in her chair. Some power outside of her own will seemed to constrain her. "Philip," she said, bending over and touching his hand, "has love made you doubt?" The question evidently took him entirely by surprise. She wondered what impulse had made her speak and how her question would affect him. He flushed to his forehead, and cast at her a look so full of pathetic appeal that she felt the tears come into her eyes. It was the look of a hunted creature which sees no way of escape, yet which has not the fury of resistance, which pleads its own weakness. She knew that Philip could not equivocate and that the secret of his heart lay bare before her. She shrank from what she had done, and a flood of pity and sympathy filled her mind. He gave her no more than a single look, and then buried his face in his hands. "I have betrayed my high calling," he exclaimed in a voice of bitter suffering. "I have put my hand to the plough and looked back. I am too weak to be worthy to"-- "Stop," she interposed brusquely, although she was deeply touched. "I can't listen to that sort of talk. It isn't wholesome and it isn't manly. If you have fallen short of your ideal, your experience is that of the rest of the race. I suppose the secret of our making any progress is the power of conceiving things higher than we can reach. It keeps us trying." "But I devoted myself to"-- "My dear boy," she interrupted him again, "you are like the rest of us. You told yourself that you would be above all the passions and emotions of common humanity, and you are discouraged to find that you're human after all. That's really the whole of it." "But to allow yourself to love"-- It was not necessary for her to interrupt him now. He stopped of his own will, casting down his eyes and blushing like a school-boy. It seemed to her that it might be better to try raillery. "To allow yourself, O wise cousin!" she cried. "Men do not allow or disallow themselves to love. It's deeper business than that." "But I should have had strength not to yield." "Is there anything discreditable in loving?" she demanded. "There is for a priest." "If there were, you are not a priest." "In intention I am; and that is the same in the sight of Heaven."