“It’s no good.  If I made my confession to a priest who’d been my friend, I’d never want to see him again for shame.  I’d run round the corner, if he appeared in the street.”

“On the contrary,” said Monty, “you’d run to meet him.  You’d know that you were dearer to him than you could possibly have been, if you had never gone to him in confession.  You’d know that your relations after the sacred moment of confession were more intimate than ever before.”

I saw Doe’s defence crumbling beneath this attack.  I knew he would instantly want these intimate relations to exist between Monty and himself.  Monty, subtly enough, had borne down on that part of Doe’s make-up which was most certain to give way—­his yielding affectionateness.

And, while Doe remained silent and thoughtful, Monty attacked with a new weight of argument at a fresh point—­Doe’s love of the heroic.

“Don’t you think,” he asked, “that, if you’ve gone the whole way with your sins, it’s up to a sportsman to go the whole way with his confession.  And anybody knows that it’s much more difficult to confess to God through a priest than in the privacy of one’s own room.  It’s difficult, but it’s the grand thing; and so it appeals to an heroic nature more.”

“Yes, I see that,” assented Doe.

Monty said nothing further for awhile, as if hoping we would declare our decision without any prompting from him.  But we were shy and silent; and at last he asked: 

“Well, what’s the decision?”

“I’ll come to you,” I said, “if you’ll show me how to do it all.”

He replied nothing.  I believe he was too happy to speak.  Then he turned to Doe.

“Gazelle, what about you?”

And Doe said one of those engaging things that only he could utter: 

“I imagine I ought to do it for love of Our Lord.  But s’posing I know that isn’t the real motive—­s’posing I feel that someone has been sent into my life to put it right, and I do it rather for—­for him?”

There Monty was beaten.  Doe’s meaning was too plain; and the rich prize it threw at Monty’s feet too overwhelming.  The only answer he could give was:  “You must try and link it to love for the Higher One.”

“All right,” said Doe, simply.  “I’ll try.”

A silence of unusual length followed.  The noise of the ship going through the water, and the beat of the engines, assumed the monopoly of sound.  Doe and I were thinking of the thorny and troublesome path of confession, which in a few days we must traverse.  And Monty indicated what his thoughts were by the remark with which he prepared to close that night’s conversation under the stars.

“The two cardinal dogmas of my faith are—­”

“The Mass and confession,” I volunteered, in a flash of impudence.

“Don’t interrupt, you rude little cub.  They are these.  Just as there is more beauty in nature than ugliness, so there is more goodness in humanity than evil, and more happiness in the world than sorrow....