ou will. Our Church can be loving and
restful and harmonious and beautiful (thus the jargon of the heretic)
but it can also be masterful and tyrannical and terrible, even cruel,
so they say, although I do not go that far myself. And the call of it,
the memory of it, the significance of it, the power and majesty and
awfulness of it will draw you back. Oh! Have no fear, monsieur! If I
may charge myself with your conversion I will stake a great deal, a
very great deal indeed, on the chances of your absolute and final
surrender, with even temporary reversion an impossibility. You will
decide quickly then, monsieur, although we do not ask for haste. We
can wait."

And with emphasis in his thrilling voice the priest murmured again:
"The Church of Rome can always wait."

This statement and the other predictions concerning Ringfield were
verified in course of time, for without seeing Pauline again he made
instant preparation for the solemn and extraordinary step which closed
his career in the world as we know it. Poor Pauline! The promise
given to Henry Clairville on his death-bed was kept, it is needless to
say, but only half kept, as she did not admit the child to her
confidence, nor show it affection, and only kept at all because she
could not help herself. Very gradually her strength returned after
nearly two years of invalidism, and then the streaks of grey in her
hair, her altered figure and expression, told part of her story to
those who thought they knew all. Who at St. Ignace could enter into
her feelings or offer her consolation?

"No one could be sorrier than I am for doing the young lady an
injustice," was the loudly expressed opinion of Enderby. "Not but what
there was grounds. There is, they tell me, often a more striking
likeness between cousins, aunts, and such, than between mother and
daughter and father and son. What I done any one might have done, and
what I said I've long ago took back."

These remarks were made with characteristic magnanimity at the annual
Hawthorne festival, a couple of years after the picnic tea at which
Ringfield had assisted; held this year on 20th October, a warm sun
flooded the valley, the women wore their lightest dresses, and Mrs.
Abercorn was particularly gay in a flowered muslin, dating from the
time of William the Fourth, with _honi soit qui mal y pense_ on a blue
ribbon worked into the design of the material; a garden hat was tied
under her chin and a fur cape