All next day Mark Griffin wandered about brooding. Father Murray had returned to his old place in his thoughts. Distress had bred sympathy between the two, and instinctively Mark looked upon the priest as a friend; and, as a friend, he had cast doubt from his mind. There was an appointment to fill at Killimaga in the afternoon, an appointment to which Mark had looked forward with much joy; but he remembered the coldness of Ruth when he saw her in the church, and felt that he was not equal to meeting her, much as he longed to be in her presence. So he sent a note pleading sickness. It was not a lie, for there was a dull pain in both head and heart.
All the afternoon he walked along the bluff road, studiously avoiding Saunders who had seemed desirous of accompanying him, for Mark wanted to be alone. Taking no note of the distance, he walked on for miles. It was already late in the afternoon when he turned to go back, yet he had not thought out any solution to his own problem, nor how to approach Father Murray in behalf of the Bishop.
To Mark Griffin pain of any kind was something new. He had escaped it chiefly by reason of his clean, healthful life, and through a fear that made him take every precaution against it. He did not remember ever having had even a headache before; and, as to the awful pain in his heart, there never had been a reason for its existence till this moment.
With all the ardor of a strong nature that has found the hidden spring of human love, Mark Griffin loved Ruth Atheson. She had come into his life as the realization of an ideal which since boyhood, so he thought, had been forming in his heart. In one instant she had given that ideal a reality. For her sake he had forgotten obstacles, had resolved to overcome them or smash them; but now the greatest of them all insisted on raising itself between them. Poor, he could still have married her; rich, it would have been still easier so far as his people were concerned; but as a grand duchess she was neither rich nor poor. The blood royal was a bar that Mark knew he could not cross except with ruin to both; nor was he foolish enough to think that he would be permitted to cross it even did he so will. Secret agents would take care of that. There was no spot on earth that could hide this runaway girl longer than her royal father desired. Mark Griffin would have blessed the news that Ruth Atheson was really only the daughter of a beggar, or anything but what he now believed her to be.