The Fancy Dancer

stupidities, hesitations. And, as the spiritual writers never tire of telling you, divine love can fill only an empty place.
    My Beatrice in a fancy dancer’s costume had led me to the very beginning that Father Matt had always scolded me about. For the rest of my life, I would pray that his Beatrice—the blond stud in the cassock '—would lead him to his own beginning.
    After a while the rapture died, just the way a breeze dies. I came back to reality.
    But my soul was saying with words: Yes, I will serve.
    Today I would clear my cubbyhole room in the St. Mary’s rectory and say good-bye to Father Vance— but not to flee Montana for another life. I would sign in at the retreat house up on the Flathead this afternoon, and report to my Bishop next week. And I would have to call Doric and tell him the good news. God would give me the light and strength to live through whatever followed.
    Instead of going out through the sacristy, I climbed up to the organ loft. It had been a long time since I’d played.
    I switched the organ on, pulled out a few stops and sat there for half an hour. Anybody who came in the church would have found it empty—except for some young priest up in the loft, playing all the Bach fugues he could remember.
    SPECIAL OFFER: If you enjoyed this book and would like to have our catalog of over 1,400 other Bantam titles, just send your name and address and 25     Patricia Nell Warren was born in Helena, Montana, and grew up in Deer Lodge on her father’s historic Grant-Kohrs ranch. As a student, she won the Atlantic Monthly College Fiction Award. Later she learned Ukrainian, and has written three books of Ukrainian poetry that are regarded as among the best contemporary work in that language. In 1971, under the pseudonym Patricia Kilina, she published her first novel, The Last Centennial. In 1974 she published The Front Runner which became a bestseller and established her as one of America’s most popular novelists.
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