His ears were listening to these distant echoes amid the silence of the parlour when he became aware that the priest was addressing him in a different voice.

—­I sent for you today, Stephen, because I wished to speak to you on a very important subject.

—­Yes, sir.

—­Have you ever felt that you had a vocation?

Stephen parted his lips to answer yes and then withheld the word suddenly.  The priest waited for the answer and added: 

—­I mean, have you ever felt within yourself, in your soul, a desire to join the order?  Think.

—­I have sometimes thought of it, said Stephen.

The priest let the blindcord fall to one side and, uniting his hands, leaned his chin gravely upon them, communing with himself.

—­In a college like this, he said at length, there is one boy or perhaps two or three boys whom God calls to the religious life.  Such a boy is marked off from his companions by his piety, by the good example he shows to others.  He is looked up to by them; he is chosen perhaps as prefect by his fellow sodalists.  And you, Stephen, have been such a boy in this college, prefect of Our Blessed Lady’s sodality.  Perhaps you are the boy in this college whom God designs to call to Himself.

A strong note of pride reinforcing the gravity of the priest’s voice made Stephen’s heart quicken in response.

To receive that call, Stephen, said the priest, is the greatest honour that the Almighty God can bestow upon a man.  No king or emperor on this earth has the power of the priest of God.  No angel or archangel in heaven, no saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself, has the power of a priest of God:  the power of the keys, the power to bind and to loose from sin, the power of exorcism, the power to cast out from the creatures of God the evil spirits that have power over them; the power, the authority, to make the great God of Heaven come down upon the altar and take the form of bread and wine.  What an awful power, Stephen!

A flame began to flutter again on Stephen’s cheek as he heard in this proud address an echo of his own proud musings.  How often had he seen himself as a priest wielding calmly and humbly the awful power of which angels and saints stood in reverence!  His soul had loved to muse in secret on this desire.  He had seen himself, a young and silent-mannered priest, entering a confessional swiftly, ascending the altarsteps, incensing, genuflecting, accomplishing the vague acts of the priesthood which pleased him by reason of their semblance of reality and of their distance from it.  In that dim life which he had lived through in his musings he had assumed the voices and gestures which he had noted with various priests.  He had bent his knee sideways like such a one, he had shaken the thurible only slightly like such a one, his chasuble had swung open like that of such another as he turned to the altar again after having blessed the people.