You have no call to the religious life?
No.

Then you must give up torturing yourself in this fashion, because it is a sacrilegious thing and unseemly, seeing that the young man was nothing whatever to you.

The good God knows what is best for us; we should neither rebel nor complain ..." In all this, but one phrase left Maria a little doubting, it was the priest's assurance that Francois Paradis, in the place where now he was, cared only for masses to repose his soul, and never at all for the deep and tender regrets lingering behind him.

This she could not constrain herself to believe.

Unable to think of him otherwise in death than in life, she felt it must bring him something of happiness and consolation that her sorrow was keeping alive their ineffectual love for a little space beyond death.