If it had been a great day for Robin that he should come back to his own country after six years, and be received in this house of strange memories; that he should sit upstairs as a priest, and hear confessions in that very parlour where nearly seven years ago he had sat with Marjorie as her accepted lover—­if all this had been charged, to him, with emotions and memories which, however he had outgrown them, yet echoed somewhere wonderfully in his mind; it was no less a kind of climax and consummation to the girl whose house this was, and who had waited so long to receive back a lover who came now in so different a guise.

But it must be made plain that to neither of them was there a thought or a memory that ought not to be.  To those who hold that men are no better, except for their brains, than other animals; that they are but, after all, bundles of sense from which all love and aspiration take their rise—­to such the thing will seem simply false.  They will say that it was not so; that all that strange yearning that Marjorie had to see the man back again; that the excitement that beat in Robin’s heart as he had ridden up the well-remembered slope, all in the dark, and had seen the lighted windows at the top; that these were but the old loves in the disguise of piety.  But to those who understand what priesthood is, for him that receives it, and for the soul that reverences it, the thing is a truism.  For the priest was one who loved Christ more than all the world; and the woman one who loved priesthood more than herself.

Yet her memories of him that remained in her had, of course, a place in her heart; and, though she knelt before him presently in the little parlour where once he had kneeled before her, as simply as a child before her father, and told her sins, and received Christ’s pardon, and went away to make room for the next—­though all this was without a reproach in her eyes; yet, as she went she knew that she must face a fresh struggle, and a temptation that would not have been one-tenth so fierce if it had been some other priest that was in peril.  That peril was Fotheringay, where (as she knew well enough) every strange face would be scrutinized as perhaps nowhere else in all England; and that temptation lay in the knowledge that when that letter should come (as she knew in her heart it would come), it would be through her hands that it would pass—­if it passed indeed.

* * * * *

While the others went to the priest one by one, Marjorie kneeled in her room, fighting with a devil that was not yet come to her, as is the way with sensitive consciences.

CHAPTER VI

I

The suspense at Fotheringay grew deeper with every day that passed.