“Are you happy?” he asked in turn.

She paused, looked down, and in a deep clear voice said, “No.” There was a silence.

The priest began again: “Perhaps you have been growing in unhappiness for years; is it so? you assent. You have a heavy burden at your heart, you don’t well know what. And the chance is, that you will grow in unhappiness for the next ten years to come. You will be more and more unhappy the longer you live. Did you live till you were an old woman, you would not know how to bear your existence.”

Callista cried out as if in bodily pain, “It is true, sir, whoever told you. But how can you have the heart to say it, to insult and mock me!”

“God forbid!” exclaimed Cæcilius, “but let me go on. Listen, my child. Be brave, and dare to look at things as they are. Every day adds to your burden. This is a law of your present being, somewhat more certain than the assertion which you just now so confidently made, the impossibility of your believing in that law. You cannot refuse to accept what is not an opinion, but a fact. I say this burden which I speak of is not simply a dogma of our creed, it is an undeniable fact of nature. You cannot change it by wishing; if you were to live on earth two hundred years, it would not be reversed, it would be more and more true. At the end of two hundred years you would be too miserable even for your worst enemy to rejoice in it.”

Cæcilius spoke, as if half in soliloquy or meditation, though he was looking towards Callista. The contrast between them was singular: he thus abstracted; she too, utterly forgetful of self, but absorbed in him, and showing it by her eager eyes, her hushed breath, her anxious attitude. At last she said impatiently, “Father, you are speaking to yourself; you despise me.”

The priest looked straight at her with an open, untroubled smile, and said, “Callista, do not doubt me, my poor child; you are in my heart. I was praying for you shortly before you appeared. No; but, in so serious a matter as attempting to save a soul, I like to speak to you in my Lord’s sight. I am speaking to you, indeed I am, my child; but I am also pleading with you on His behalf, and before His throne.”