“Nay, my dear Prioress,” said the Bishop, seating himself in the Spanish chair, and laying his biretta upon the table near by; “I speak not of self-love, nor does the apostle whose words I quote.  I take it, he writes of human love, sanctified; upborne by faith and hope, yet greater than either; just as a bird is greater than its wings, yet cannot mount without them.  We must have faith, we must have hope; then our poor earthly loves can rise from the lower level of self-seeking and self-pleasing and take their place among those things that are eternal.”

The Prioress had placed her chair opposite the Bishop.  She was very pale, and her lips trembled.  She made so great an effort to speak with calmness, that her voice sounded stern and hard.

“Why this talk of earthly loves, my Lord Bishop, in a place where all earthly love has been renounced and forgotten?”

The Bishop, seeing those trembling lips, ignored the hard tones, and answered, very tenderly, with a simple directness which scorned all evasion: 

“Because, my daughter, I am here to plead for Hugh.”

CHAPTER XXVII

THE WOMAN AND HER CONSCIENCE

“For Hugh?” said the Prioress.  And then again, in low tones of incredulous amazement, “For Hugh!  What know you of Hugh, my lord?”

The Bishop looked steadfastly at the Prioress, and replied with exceeding gravity and earnestness: 

“I know that in breaking your solemn troth to him, you are breaking a very noble heart; and that in leaving his home desolate, you are robbing him not only of his happiness but also of his faith.  Men are apt to rate our holy religion, not by its theories, but by the way in which it causeth us to act in our dealings with them.  If you condemn Hugh to sit beside his hearth, through the long years, a lonely, childless man, you take the Madonna from his home; if you take your love from him, I greatly fear lest you should also rob him of his belief in the love of God.  I do not say that these things should be so; I say that we must face the fact that thus they are.  And remember—­between a man and woman of noble birth, each with a stainless escutcheon, each believing the other to be the soul of honour, a broken troth is no light matter.”

“I did not break my troth,” said the Prioress, “until I believed that Hugh had broken his.  I had suffered sore anguish of heart and humiliation of spirit, over the news of his marriage with his cousin Alfrida, ere I resolved to renounce the world and enter the cloister.”

“But Hugh did not wed his cousin, nor any other woman,” said the Bishop.  “He was true to you in every thought and act, even after he also had passed through sore anguish of heart by reason of your supposed marriage with another suitor.”

“I learned the truth but a few days since,” said the Prioress.  “For seven long years I thought Hugh false to me.  For seven long years I believed him the husband of another woman, and schooled myself to forget every memory of past tenderness.”