A long time she listened to the animated voices of the brothers.  At last the doors were pushed apart and they came out, Allan with his hand on Bernal’s shoulder.

“There’s your bag—­now hurry upstairs—­the maid will show you where.”

As Bernal went out, Nancy looked up at her husband with a manner curiously quiet.

“Well, Nance—­” He stepped to the door to see if Bernal was out of hearing—­“Bernal pleases me in the way he talks about the old gentleman’s estate.  Either he is most reasonable, or I have never known my true power over men.”

Her face was inscrutable.  Indeed, she only half heard.

“Mrs. Covil has been telling me some of your broader views on divorce.”

The words shot from her lips with the crispness of an arrow, going straight to the bull’s-eye.

He glanced quickly at her, the hint of a frown drawing about his eyes.

“Mrs. Covil should have been more discreet.  The authority of a priest in these matters is a thing of delicate adjustment—­the law for one may not be the law for all.  These are not matters to gossip of.”

“So it seems.  I was thinking of your opposite counsel to Mrs. Eversley.”

“There—­really, you know I read minds, at times—­somehow I knew that would be the next thing you’d speak of.”

“Yes?”

“The circumstances are entirely different—­I may add that—­that any intimation of inconsistency will be very unpleasing to me—­very!”

“I can see that the circumstances are different—­the Eversleys are not what you would call ‘important factors’ in the Church—­and besides—­that is a case of a wife leaving her husband.”

“Nance—­I’m afraid you’re not pleasing me—­if I catch your drift.  Must I point out the difference—­the spiritual difference?  That misguided woman wanted to desert her husband merely because he had hurt her pride—­her vanity—­by certain alleged attentions to other women, concerning the measure of which I had no knowledge.  That was a case where the cross must be borne for the true refining of that dross of vanity from her soul.  Her husband is of her class, and her life with him will chasten her.  While here—­what have we here?”

He began to pace the floor as he was wont to do when he prepared a sermon.

“Here we have a flagrant example of what is nothing less than spiritual miscegenation—­that’s it!—­why didn’t I think of that phrase before—­spiritual miscegenation.  A rattle-brained boy, with the connivance of a common magistrate, effects a certain kind of alliance with a person inferior to him in every point of view—­birth, breeding, station, culture, wealth—­a person, moreover, who will doubtless be glad to relinquish her so-called rights for a sum of money.  Can that, I ask you, be called a marriage? Can we suppose an all-wise God to have joined two natures so ill-adapted, so mutually exclusive, so repellent to each other after