On the Sunday following their betrothal, he asked her if she would go with him to church, and she readily assented. "I always liked Catholicity," she said, as they took their way thither; "and I always felt that if there was truth in any religion, it was in that. All the others are but poor shams and imitations of it, and I have had an instinctive scorn of them ever since I knew anything of the old faith. I am glad, therefore, that you are a Catholic."
"Since I am not an Agnostic," he said, laughing. "You would have had a higher opinion of my intellectual strength if I had avowed myself that, you know."
She laughed too. "That was before I understood you," she said; "and before I understood the grounds you had for your faith. But now I know that you could be only what you are."
"And when," he asked, in a tone suddenly grown grave and earnest, "will you also be that?"
"How can I tell?" she replied. "Should not faith be something more than a mere matter of intellectual conviction?"
"Faith is a gift of God," he said. "If you are willing to receive it, it will not be denied to you."
"I am willing now," she observed. "Always, heretofore, I have shrunk from it. I have felt the fascination of Catholicity, but I have dreaded what it would demand from me. But now I dread no longer. I am willing to be what you are."
He smiled slightly, and, as they had reached the church by this time, extended his hand to lead her over the threshold. Then withdrawing it, "There!" he said; "I have done my part--I have brought you within the door. God must do the rest."
It seemed to Marion, as she knelt by him during Mass, as if God were doing this. Her heart opened to the influences around her as it had never opened before. The Holy Sacrifice had a meaning for her which it had never, up to this time, possessed; she forgot the plainness and bareness of the chapel, the unfashionable appearance of the people, in her consciousness of the Divine Reality before her on the altar. And when the priest, addressing the people at the end of Mass, spoke in plain and forcible language of the truths of faith, her mind replied by an assenting _Credo_.
But as he turned to preach, Father Byrne received a shock of unpleasant surprise in perceiving Marion's face by Brian Earle's side. He had not seen or heard of her since the occurrences which had ended Helen's engagement. He had not been aware that she still remained in Scarborough after her aunt's departure; but he had met Earle, and liked the young man so much that this unexpected appearance beside him of the girl who had destroyed her cousin's happiness, seemed to him a conjunction that boded no good. The sight distracted him so much that he hesitated over the opening words of his sermon. The hesitation was only momentary: he took a firm grasp of his subject, and began; but whenever his glance fell on those two faces in one of the front pews, he said to himself, "Poor young man!" and asked himself if, knowing what he did, he should offer a warning to the object of his commiseration.