Yet the firm sweet lips were there, unchanged; and, even as he marked them, they quivered and parted.
"Reverend Father," she said, "I have chosen, even as you prayed I might do, the harder part." She flung aside the riding-whip she carried; and folding her hands, held them up before him.

"For Christ's sake, my Lord Bishop, pray for me!" He took those folded hands in his, gently parted them, and held them against the cross upon his heart.
"You have chosen rightly, my child," he said; "we will pray that grace and strength may be vouchsafed you, so that you may continue, without faltering, along the pathway of this fresh vocation." She looked at him with searching gaze.

The kind and gentle eyes of the Bishop met hers without wavering; also without any trace of the fire--the keen brightness--which had startled her as she stood in the doorway.
"Reverend Father," she said, and there was a strange note of bewildered question in her voice: "I pray you, tell me what you bid penitents to remember as they kneel in prayer before the crucifix ?" The Bishop looked full into those starry grey eyes bent upon him, and his own did not falter.

His mild voice took on a shade of sternness as befitted the solemn subject of her question.
"I tell them, my daughter, to remember, the sacred Wounds that bled and the Heart that broke for them." She drew her hands from beneath his, and stepped back a pace.
"The Heart that broke ?" she said.

"That _broke_?
Do hearts break ?" she cried.