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 is to be a priest; and of the life that he will lead, and of the death that he may die!...  And it is I ...  I ... who will have sent him to it.  Mother!...”

Mrs. Manners was bethinking herself of a cordial just then, and how she knew old Ann would be coming presently, and was listening with but half an ear.

“It’s not you, my dear,” she said, patting the head beneath her hands.  (The wrap was fallen off, and the maid’s long hair was all over her shoulders.) “And now—­”

“But our Lord will take care of him, will He not?  And not suffer—­”

Mrs. Manners fell to patting her head again.

“And who brought the message?” she asked.

* * * * *