Then the Jesuit turned round and faced him. "It was because I feared for your success that I mentioned my own trouble," he said. "You are planning to do a thing which is right in marrying this half-breed girl--you owe it to her and to God, inasmuch as you have lived with her. But you will be doing her a greater wrong than if you were to leave her unmarried, if, when you have made her your wife, you think only of the dead white woman. When the turmoil of living is over, you want to meet and be worthy of the woman who wrote those letters, you tell me; your best chance of success in that desire is in trying to forget her in this world, by giving all your affection to the woman who is your wife, and trusting to God's goodness to give you the rewards which He knows that you covet after death. Don't make my mistake--it means torture in this life, and, perhaps, disappointment in the next. Be true to the choice which you have made, and leave the rest to God's mercy. I have not been strong enough to do all that I advise, for, though I love Christ, I am shamed into owning, old man though I am, that I more often do His work in the hope of re-meeting with a woman who is dead than out of loyalty to Christ Himself."
"Père Antoine, you do not judge kindly of your own actions as Christ would judge of them; you Catholics, in making Christ God, forget that He also was a lonely man. I think it is not as a God, but as a peasant that He will judge us, having knowledge of what we have suffered--if He judges us at all. It is more likely that He will just be sorry for us, that we ever thought that He would judge us."
"Whether I judge kindly or not, will you try to take my advice? I have told you a secret to-night which never, since I came to Keewatin, have I told to any man. And I have told you that I may save you. Believe me, if you cannot love your daily companions for their own sake in this world, whoever and wherever they are, you will fail to find love for your own sake in the next--and to love well, whatever you love you must love for itself, and not for any future and mercenary end."
Granger moved restlessly, but remained silent; then he sat still and thought. Père Antoine also said nothing, for he knew that the man before him was reasoning his way toward a decision upon which all his happiness must depend.