as the old man stared up at him through sleep-ridden
eyes, "I have come to give you my answer. It is that I must go to Rheims
and be a priest."

Then he turned again and went out of the room, without waiting.

CHAPTER IX

I

Mrs. Manners was still abed when her daughter came in to see her. She
lay in the great chamber that gave upon the gallery above the hall
whence, on either side, she could hear whether or no the maids were at
their business--which was a comfort to her if a discomfort to them. And
now that her lord was in Derby, she lay here all alone.

The first that she knew of her daughter's coming was a light in her
eyes; and the next was a face, as of a stranger, looking at her with
great eyes, exalted by joy and pain. The light, held below, cast shadows
upwards from chin and cheek, and the eyes shone in hollows. Then, as she
sat up, she saw that it was her daughter, and that the maid held a paper
in her hands; she was in her night-linen, and a wrap lay over her
shoulders and shrouded her hair.

"He is to be a priest," she whispered sharply. "Thank our Lord with me
... and ... and God have mercy on me!"

Then Marjorie was on her knees by the bedside, sobbing so that the
curtains shook.

* * * * *

The mother got it all out of her presently--the tale of the girl's heart
torn two ways at once. On the one side there was her human love for the
lad who had wooed her--as hot as fire, and as pure--and on the other
that keen romance that had made her pray that he might be a priest. This
second desire had come to her, as sharp as a voice that calls, when she
had heard of the apostasy of his father; it had seemed to her the
riposte that God made to the assault upon His honour. The father would
no longer be His worshipper? Then let the son be His priest; and so the
balance be restored. And so the maid had striven with the two loves
that, for once, would not agree together (as did the man in the Gospels
who wished to go and bury his father and afterwards to follow his
Saviour); she had not dared to say a word to the lad of anything of this
lest it should be her will and not God's that should govern him, for she
knew very well what a power she had over him; but she had prayed God,
and begged Robin to pray too and to listen to His voice; and now she had
her way, and her heart was broken with it, she said:

"And when I think," she wailed across her mother's knees, "of what it i