“I don’t bore you about it?”

“No, I like jawing.”

“Well then, I was going to say, of course you don’t know how it struck me.”

“Yes, I do, but I don’t think any the better of it for that.”

“You knew about my vow?  I suppose you think that—­”

“Bosh?  Yes, I do.  I think all vows bosh; but without asking you to agree to that, though I think I did ask the Bishop of Bellminster to, I do say this one is utter bosh.  Why, your own people say so, don’t they?”

“My own people?  The people I suppose you mean don’t say so.  I took a vow never to marry—­there were even more stringent terms—­but that’s enough.”

“Well?”

“A vow,” continued Stafford, “that you won’t marry till you want to is not the same as a vow never to marry.”

“No.  I think I could manage the first sort.”

“The first sort,” said Stafford, with a smile, “is nowadays a popular compromise.”

“I detest compromises.  That’s why I liked you.”

“You’re advising me to make one now.”

“No, I advise you to throw up the whole thing.”

“That’s because you don’t believe in anything?”

“Yes, probably.”

“Suppose you believed all I believe and had done all I had?”

“How do you mean?”

“You believed what a priest believes—­in heaven and hell—­the gaining God and the losing him—­in good and evil.  Supposing you, believing this, had given your life to God, and made your vow to him—­had so proclaimed before men, had so lived and worked and striven!  Supposing you thought a broken vow was death to your own soul and a trap to the souls of others—­a baseness, a treason, a desertion—­more cowardly than a soldier’s flight—­as base as a thief’s purloining—­meaning to you and those who had trusted you the death of good and the triumph of evil?”

He sat still, but his voice was raised in rapid and intense utterance; he gazed before him with starting eyes.

“All that,” he went on, “it meant to me—­all that and more—­the triumph of the beast in me—­passion and desire rampant—­man forsaken and God betrayed—­my peace forever gone, my honor forever stained.  Can’t you see?  Can’t you see?”

Morewood rose and paced up and down.

“Now—­now can you judge?  You say you knew—­did you know that?”

“Do you still believe all that?”

“Yes, all, and more than all.  For a moment—­a day—­perhaps a week, I drove myself to doubt.  I tried to doubt—­I rejoiced in it.  But I cannot.  As God is above us, I believe all that.”

“If you break this vow you think you will be—?”

“The creature I have said?  Yes—­and worse.”

“I think the vow utter nonsense,” said Morewood again.

“But if you thought as I think, then would your love—­yes, and would a girl’s heart, weigh with you?”

Morewood stood still.

“I can hardly realize it,” he said, “in a man of your brain.  But—­”