And what rapture, what
felicity would then have been his! He would have given himself wholly
unto her, she would have been wholly his own, and he and she would have
lived again in the dear child that would doubtless have been born to
them. Ah! surely that alone was divine, the life which is complete, the
life which creates life! And then his reverie strayed: he pictured
himself married, and the thought filled him with such delight that he
asked why such a dream should be unrealisable? She knew no more than a
child of ten; he would educate her, form her mind. She would then
understand that this cure for which she thought herself indebted to the
Blessed Virgin, had in reality come to her from the Only Mother, serene
and impassive Nature. But even whilst he was thus settling things in his
mind, a kind of terror, born of his religious education, arose within
him. Could he tell if that human happiness with which he desired to endow
her would ever be worth as much as the holy ignorance, the infantile
candour in which she now lived? How bitterly he would reproach himself
afterwards if she should not be happy. Then, too, what a drama it would
all be; he to throw off the cassock, and marry this girl healed by an
alleged miracle--ravage her faith sufficiently to induce her to consent
to such sacrilege? Yet therein lay the brave course; there lay reason,
life, real manhood, real womanhood. Why, then, did he not dare? Horrible
sadness was breaking upon his reverie, he became conscious of nothing
beyond the sufferings of his poor heart.
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