ean it?" he asked.

"I do," I answered, and unable to say or hear any more without breaking
out on him altogether I left the room.

THIRTY-NINTH CHAPTER

Down to this moment I had put on a brave front though my very heart had
been trembling; but now I felt that all the weight of law, custom,
parental authority and even religion was bearing me down, down, down,
and unless help came I must submit in the long run.

I was back in the small bedroom, with my hot forehead against the cold
glass of the window, looking out yet seeing nothing, when somebody
knocked at the door, softly almost timidly. It was Father Dan, and the
sight of his dear face, broken up with emotion, was the same to me as
the last plank of a foundering ship to a sailor drowning at sea.

My heart was so full that, though I knew I ought not, I threw my arms
about his neck and burst into a flood of tears. The good old priest did
not put me away. He smoothed my drooping head and patted my shoulders
and in his sweet and simple way he tried to comfort me.

"Don't cry! Don't worry! It will be all right in the end, my child."

There was something almost grotesque in his appearance. Under his soft
clerical outdoor hat he was wearing his faded old cassock, as if he had
come away hurriedly at a sudden call. I could see what had happened--my
family had sent him to reprove me and remonstrate with me.

He sat on a chair by my bed and I knelt on the floor at his feet, just
as my mother used to do when I was a child and she was making her
confession. Perhaps he thought of that at the same moment as myself, for
the golden light of my mother's memory lay always about him. For some
moments we did not speak. I think we were both weeping.

At length I tried to tell him what had happened--hiding nothing,
softening nothing, speaking the simple and naked truth. I found it
impossible to do so. My odd-sounding voice was not like my own, and even
my words seemed to be somebody else's. But Father Dan understood
everything.

"I know! I know!" he said, and then, to my great relief, interrupting my
halting explanations, he gave his own interpretation of my husband's
letter.

There was a higher love and there was a lower love and both were
necessary to God's plans and purposes. But the higher love must come
first, or else the lower one would seem to be cruel and gross and
against nature.

Nature was kind to a young girl. Left to itself it awakened her sex very
gent