, love will come. Of course it will. It will come in time. If
you don't exactly love your husband when you marry him you'll love him
later on. A wife ought to teach herself to love her husband. I know I
had to, and if. . . ."

"But if she can't, Auntie?"

"Then she ought to be ashamed of herself, and say nothing about it."

It was useless to say more, so I rose to go.

"Yes, go," said Aunt Bridget. "I'm so bothered with other people's
business that my head's all through-others. And, Mary O'Neill," she
said, looking after me as I passed through the door, "for mercy's sake
do brighten up a hit, and don't look as if marrying a husband was like
taking a dose of jalap. It isn't as bad as that, anyway."

It served me right. I should have known better. My aunt and I spoke
different languages; we stood on different ground.

Returning to my room I found a letter from Father Dan. It ran--

_"Dear Daughter in Jesus,

"I have been afraid to go far into the story we spoke about from fear of
offending my Bishop, but I have inquired of your father and he assures
me that there is not a word of truth in it.

"So I am compelled to believe that our good Martin must have been
misinformed, and am dismissing the matter from my mind. Trusting you
will dismiss it from your mind also,

"Yours in Xt.,

"D.D."_

TWENTY-NINTH CHAPTER

I could not do as Father Dan advised, being now enmeshed in the threads
of innumerable impulses unknown to myself, and therefore firmly
convinced that Martin's story was not only true, but a part of the whole
sordid business whereby a husband was being bought for me.

With this thought I went about all day, asking myself what I could do
even yet, but finding no answer until nine o'clock at night, when,
immediately after supper (we lived country fashion), Aunt Bridget said:

"Now then, off to bed, girls. Everybody must be stirring early in the
morning."

And then I slipped upstairs to my room, and replied to Father Dan.

Never had I written such a letter before. I poured my whole heart on to
the paper, saying what marriage meant to me, as the Pope himself had
explained it, a sacrament implying and requiring love as the very soul
of it, and since I did not feel this love for the man I was about to
marry, and had no grounds for thinking he felt it for me, and being sure
that other reasons had operated to bring us together, I begged Father
Dan, by his memory of my mother, and his affection fo