s very
pale, and her lips trembled. She made so great an effort to speak with
calmness, that her voice sounded stern and hard.

"Why this talk of earthly loves, my Lord Bishop, in a place where all
earthly love has been renounced and forgotten?"

The Bishop, seeing those trembling lips, ignored the hard tones, and
answered, very tenderly, with a simple directness which scorned all
evasion:

"Because, my daughter, I am here to plead for Hugh."

CHAPTER XXVII

THE WOMAN AND HER CONSCIENCE

"For Hugh?" said the Prioress. And then again, in low tones of
incredulous amazement, "For Hugh! What know you of Hugh, my lord?"

The Bishop looked steadfastly at the Prioress, and replied with
exceeding gravity and earnestness:

"I know that in breaking your solemn troth to him, you are breaking a
very noble heart; and that in leaving his home desolate, you are
robbing him not only of his happiness but also of his faith. Men are
apt to rate our holy religion, not by its theories, but by the way in
which it causeth us to act in our dealings with them. If you condemn
Hugh to sit beside his hearth, through the long years, a lonely,
childless man, you take the Madonna from his home; if you take your
love from him, I greatly fear lest you should also rob him of his
belief in the love of God. I do not say that these things should be
so; I say that we must face the fact that thus they are. And
remember--between a man and woman of noble birth, each with a stainless
escutcheon, each believing the other to be the soul of honour, a broken
troth is no light matter."

"I did not break my troth," said the Prioress, "until I believed that
Hugh had broken his. I had suffered sore anguish of heart and
humiliation of spirit, over the news of his marriage with his cousin
Alfrida, ere I resolved to renounce the world and enter the cloister."

"But Hugh did not wed his cousin, nor any other woman," said the
Bishop. "He was true to you in every thought and act, even after he
also had passed through sore anguish of heart by reason of your
supposed marriage with another suitor."

"I learned the truth but a few days since," said the Prioress. "For
seven long years I thought Hugh false to me. For seven long years I
believed him the husband of another woman, and schooled myself to
forget every memory of past tenderness."

"You were both deceived," said the Bishop. "You have both passed
through deep waters. You each owe it to t