“Ah, I see,” cried Mrs. Rolfe, jumping to a conclusion. “He _has_ thrown off his incognito, and there was something dreadful,—a living wife in a lunatic asylum—or—” Alice smiled. “No, it is nothing of that kind. To tell you the truth, it is all nonsense. Mary is making a mountain of a mole-hill.” “A mountain of a mole-hill?” “Yes.” “Well?” “It is all perfectly absurd—” “What disturbs the poor child,—tell me?” “Some nonsensical fears as to his religious tendencies.” “His religious tendencies?” echoed Mrs. Rolfe, puzzled. Suddenly light seemed to break upon her. “For heaven’s sake, Alice,” she cried, pale with anxiety, “you do not mean to say that he is a Catholic! Don’t tell me that. Tell me that he is a—a—an Atheist,—anything but a Catholic!” “An Atheist rather than a Catholic?” said Alice, raising her eyes to those of Mrs. Rolfe for the first time for several minutes. “Most assuredly; a thousand times rather. Why, when I was a girl, several of my acquaintances married young men who were pleased to consider themselves sceptics,—it was rather the fashion in those days,—but, bless you, the last one of them was a vestryman before five years of married life had passed. But a Catholic! Heaven forbid! One of two things, Alice, invariably happens to a Protestant girl who marries a Catholic. Either, halting between opposing claims, she loses all interest in religion itself, or else she goes over to the enemy. Oh, Alice, Alice,” cried she, with sudden vehemence, “do not tell me that my poor Mary loves a Catholic! Lost to me in this world—and—” I will tell you, my Ah Yung Whack, what Mrs. Rolfe was going to say when Alice interrupted her with a merry laugh. She was going to add, “lost in the next.” It was, indeed, as I have hinted in earlier chapters of this work, the settled conviction of the Protestants of Virginia, at that day, that all Catholics were as surely destined to the bottomless pit as the very heathen who had never so much as heard a whisper of the Glad Tidings. (My Catholic friends often complained to me of this bigotry. For my part, I hardly knew whether to laugh or to weep when I remembered that they had made precisely the same arrangements for my Protestant acquaintance.) “Why, who told you he was a Catholic?” “Heaven be praised! Then what _is_ he, pray?” “I am afraid he is a little sceptical,—or—or—something.”