“I think that is correct,” she said, showing the bill to her uncle. “I am mathematical in my tastes, you know. I do not like the dollars, though, the association is so vulgar. We will put it in some classical gold coin. It shall be rose-nobles.”
Looking in Mr. Yorke’s face as he smiled on her, she exclaimed, “Uncle, you have a look of my father, now!”
“And you have a look of my brother,” he returned. “Your eyes are changeful, like his, and your hair has a sunny hue. When you coax, too, your ways are like his. Robert was very winning.”
She put her arm in his, and looked reproachfully across the table to her aunt. “And yet,” she said, “you are not willing that I should give Melicent a few pocket-handkerchiefs to be married with!”
Mrs. Yorke laughed. “You shall give her as many handkerchiefs as you please,” she said.
Mrs. Yorke had called at once to see him on her arrival, but he had already gone to make a retreat, and they did not see him afterward.
The first part of that retreat was to him heavenly; but, when it came to making definite plans for the future, then he found himself in cruel doubt.
“Oh! if I could have had a Catholic training in early life!” he said to Father John. “It seems to me now that heaven has been within my reach, and has slipped away, without my knowing it. I do not wish to be presuming. I do not try to think of it; the thought haunts me.”
“Tell me freely all that is in your mind,” the priest said. “I am here to help you.”
Dick Rowan’s head drooped, and he spoke rapidly, as if afraid to speak: “It seems to me, father, that if I had been brought up a strict Catholic--any sort of Catholic--I should have been--” He lifted his face, looked at Father John with eyes that could not bear suspense, and added, “I should have been a priest!”
Then, since he found neither astonishment nor displeasure in that face, his distress broke forth. “And now, O God! it is too late!” he said, and wrung his hands.
“You think that you had a vocation, my son?” the priest asked calmly.
“I believe it!” he answered. “What has my whole life been but a searching and striving after some great and glorious happiness, something different from the common happiness of earth, some one delight which was to be mine here, and still more mine in the world to come? It was always my way to have but one wish, and to expect from its fulfilment what nothing on earth can give. I believe, sir, that when a man has that way of concentrating all his hopes and desires on one object, that object should be God. Otherwise, there is nothing but ruin for him. Such an end was once possible to me, and now it is lost!”