“Do take care that you do not break his heart!”

“My dear!  You forget that I sit under Mr. O’Blareaway, and am to him as a heathen and a publican.  Fresh from St. Nepomuc’s as he is, he would as soon think of falling in love with an ‘Oirish Prodestant,’ as with a malignant and a turbaned Turk.  Besides, my dear, if the mischief is going to be done, it’s done already.”

“I dare say it is, you naughty beautiful thing.  If anybody is goose enough to fall in love with you, he’ll be also goose enough, I don’t doubt, to do so at first sight.  There, don’t look perpetually in that glass:  but take care!”

“What use?  If it is going to happen at all, I say, it has happened already; so I shall just please myself, as usual.”

And it had happened:  and poor Frank had been, ever since the first day he saw Valencia, over head and ears in love.  His time had come, and there was no escaping his fate.

But to escape he tried.  Convinced, with many good men of all ages and creeds, that a celibate life was the fittest one for a clergyman, he had fled from St. Nepomuc’s into the wilderness to avoid temptation, and beheld at his cell-door a fairer fiend than ever came to St. Dunstan.  A fairer fiend, no doubt; for St. Dunstan’s imagination created his temptress for him, but Valencia was a reality:  and fact and nature may be safely backed to produce something more charming than any monk’s brain can do.  One questions whether St. Dunstan’s apparition was not something as coarse as his own mind, clever though that mind was.  At least, he would never have had the heart to apply the hot tongs to such a nose as Valencia’s, but at most have bowed her out pityingly, as Frank tried to bow out Valencia from the sacred place of his heart, but failed.

Hard he tried, and humbly too.  He had no proud contempt for married parsons.  He was ready enough to confess, that he, too, might be weak in that respect, as in a hundred others.  He conceived that he had no reason, from his own inner life, to believe himself worthy of any higher vocation—­proving his own real nobleness of soul by that very humility.  He had rather not marry.  He might do so some day:  but he would sacrifice much to avoid the necessity.  If he was weak, he would use what strength he had to the uttermost ere he yielded.  And all the more, because he felt, and reasonably enough, that Valencia was the last woman in the world to make a parson’s wife.  He had his ideal of what such a wife should be, if she were to be allowed to exist at all—­the same ideal which Mr. Paget has drawn in his charming little book (would that all parsons’ wives would read and perpend), the “Owlet of Owlstone Edge.”  But Valencia would surely not make a Beatrice.  Beautiful she was, glorious, lovable, but not the helpmeet whom he needed.  And he fought against the new dream like a brave man.  He fasted, he wept, he prayed:  but his prayers seemed not to be heard.  Valencia