"She cannot mean," said his rising pride, "to lead and direct me as a
pupil, when I am at the age of judging of my own actions?--this she
cannot mean, or meaning it, will feel herself strangely deceived."
A sense of gratitude towards the person against whom his heart thus
rebelled, checked his course of feeling. He resisted the thoughts
which involuntarily arose in his mind, as he would have resisted an
actual instigation of the foul fiend; and, to aid him in his struggle,
he felt for his beads. But, in his hasty departure from the Castle of
Avenel, he had forgotten and left them behind him.
"This is yet worse," he said; "but two things I learned of her under
the most deadly charge of secrecy--to tell my beads, and to conceal
that I did so; and I have kept my word till now; and when she shall
ask me for the rosary, I must say I have forgotten it! Do I deserve
she should believe me when. I say I have kept the secret of my faith,
when I set so light by its symbol?"
He paced the floor in anxious agitation. In fact, his attachment to
his faith was of a nature very different from that which animated the
enthusiastic matron, but which, notwithstanding, it would have been
his last thought to relinquish.
The early charges impressed on him by his grandmother, had been
instilled into a mind and memory of a character peculiarly tenacious.
Child as he was, he was proud of the confidence reposed in his
discretion, and resolved to show that it had not been rashly intrusted
to him.
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