“I went with her to the front of battle, and we found him after a time.  It was a search, but we found his grave, and we brought him home with us.  Poor boy! beyond recognition, except for the ring he wore; but she gave him the last kiss, and then she was ready to leave the world.  She took the vows as Sister Clara, the holy vows of poverty and charity.”

“But, Father,” said Fanny, with a new depth in her eyes, “did she not die behind the bars?  To be shut up in a convent with that grief at her heart!”

“Bars there were none,” said the Father gently.  “She left her vocation to me, and I decided for her to become a Sister of Mercy.  I have little sympathy,” with a shrug half argumentative, half deprecatory—­“but little sympathy with the conventual system for spirits like hers.  She would have wasted and worn away in the offices of prayer.  She needed action.  And she had the full of it in her calling.  She went from bedside to bedside of the sick and dying—­here a child in a fever; there a widow-woman in the last stages of consumption—­night after night, and day after day, with no rest, no thought of herself.”

“Oh, I have seen her,” I could not help interposing, “in a city car.  A shrouded figure that was conspicuous even in her serge dress.  She read a book of Hours all the time, but I caught one glimpse of her eyes:  they were very brilliant.”

“Yes,” sighed the Father, “it was an unnatural brightness.  I was called away to Montreal, or I should never have permitted the sacrifice.  She went where-ever the worst cases were of contagion and poverty, and she would have none to relieve her at her post.  So, when I returned after three months’ absence, I was shocked at the change:  she was dying of their family disease.  ‘It is better, so,’ she said, ’dear Father.  It was only the bullet that saved Harry from it, and it would have been sure to come to me at last, after some opera or ball.’  She died last winter—­so patient and pure, and such a saintly sufferer!”

The Father wiped his eyes.  Why should I think of Bessie?  Why should the Sister’s veiled figure and pale ardent face rise before me as if in warning?

Of just such overwhelming sacrifice was my darling capable were her life’s purpose wrecked.  Something there was in the portrait of the sweet singleness, the noble scorn of self, the devotion unthinking, uncalculating, which I knew lay hidden in her soul.

The Father warmed into other themes, all in the same key of mother Church.  I listened dreamily, and to my own thoughts as well.

He pictured the priest’s life of poverty, renunciation, leaving the world of men, the polish and refinement of scholars, to take the confidences and bear the burdens of grimy poverty and ignorance.  Surely, I thought, we do wrong to shut such men out of our sympathies, to label them “Dangerous.”  Why should we turn the cold shoulder? are we so true to our ideals?  But one glance at the young priests as they sat crouching in the outer cabin, telling their beads and crossing themselves with the vehemence of a frightened faith, was enough.  Father Shamrock was no type.  Very possibly his own life would show but coarse and poor against the chaste, heroic portraits he had drawn.  He had the dramatic faculty:  for the moment he was what he related—­that was all.