failed is better than never to have sought at all.  So long as life lasts, no failure is forever; it is always possible to arise and return to the path.  And a fall should call forth the charity of the beholder, leading him closer to God.  But there is no charity for the Catholic priest who stumbles—­no return save in spaces hidden from the world.  The most arrant criminals, the most dangerous atheists, the most sincere Protestants, demand of the priest not only literal obedience to his vows, but a sublime observance of their spirit.  Why, Mark, you demand it yourself—­you know you do.”

For a moment Mark did not answer.

“Yes,” he said, after a pause, “I do demand it.  I only wondered if others felt as I do.  This job of trying to analyze one’s own emotions and thoughts is a difficult one.  I have been trying to do it for years.  Frankly, there are things I cannot grasp.  Let me put one of them before you now.”

“Go on,” said Father Murray.  “I am glad the conversation is off the worry.”

“You remember, Father,” said Mark, “the day I met you in your study that eventful Sunday in London?”

The priest nodded.

“I had decided then to go out of the church, as I told you, to get away from my faith.  I thought that I had come to that decision with a clear conscience, but I know now that I had merely built up a false one and that that was why I sought you out—­not to give up, but to defy you, and defy my own heart at the same time.  I thought that if I could justify myself before such a man as you it would set things at rest within me for the remainder of my days.  I did not justify myself.  Ever since that day I have been attracted by the open doors of Catholic churches.  I never pass one without seeing that open door.  The minute I seriously think of religion the picture of an open church door is in front of me; it has become almost an obsession.  I seem to see a hand beckoning from that door; some day I shall see more than the hand—­my mother’s face will be behind it.  I can’t get away from it—­and I can’t understand why.”

Father Murray’s eyes were serious.

“Why, my dear Mark,” he answered, “you ought to know that you can’t get away.  Do you suppose anybody ever got away from God?  Do you suppose any man ever could close his eyes to the fact of His existence?  Then how is it possible for you to get away from that which first told you of God, and which so long represented to you all that you knew about Him?  There is in the Catholic faith a strange something which makes those who have not belonged to it vaguely uneasy, but which makes those who have once had it always unsatisfied without it.  There is an influence akin to that of the magnetic pole, only it draws everything.  It intrudes itself upon every life.  There seems to be no middle course between loving it and hating it; but, once known, it cannot be ignored.  It has had its chain around you, Mark, and you are only now realizing that you can’t cast it off.”