The guests of Hercules

								

safer forever in the convent where she had lived most of her years. And
though she herself was four years younger, she felt old and mature, and
terribly wise compared with Sister Rose. An awful sense of
responsibility was upon her. She was afraid of it. Her pretty blond
face, with its bright and shrewd gray eyes, looked almost drawn, and
lost the fresh colour that made the little golden freckles charming as
the dust of flower-pollen on her rounded cheeks.
"But I have got something to do with it, haven't I?" she persisted,
longing for contradiction, yet certain that it would not come.
"I hardly know--to be quite honest," Mary answered. "I don't know what I
might have done if you hadn't come back and told me things about your
life, and all your travels with your father--things that made me tingle.
Maybe I should never have had the courage without that incentive. But,
Peter, I'll tell you something I couldn't have told you till to-day.
Since the very beginning of my novitiate I was never happy, never at
rest."
"Truly? You wanted to go, even then, for two whole years?"
"I don't know what I wanted. But suddenly all the sweet calm was broken.
You've often looked out from the dormitory windows over the lake, and
seen how a wind springing up in an instant ruffles the clear surface.
It's just like a mirror broken into a thousand tiny fragments. Well, it
was so with me, with my spirit. And after all these years, when I'd been
so contented, so happy that I couldn't even bear, as a schoolgirl, to go
away for two or three days to visit Lady MacMillan in the holidays,
without nearly dying of homesickness before I could be brought back! As
a postulant I was just as happy, too. You know, I wouldn't go out into
the world to try my resolve, as Reverend Mother advised. I was so sure
there could be no home for me but this. Then came the change. Oh, Peter,
I hope it wasn't the legacy! I pray I'm not so mean as that!"
"How long was it after your novitiate began that the money was left
you?" Peter asked: for this was the first intimate talk alone and
undisturbed that she had had with her old school friend since coming
back to the convent three months ago. She knew vaguely that a cousin of
Mary's dead father had left the novice money, and that it had been
unexpected, as the lady was not a Roman Catholic, and had relations just
as near, of her own religion. But Peter did not quite know when the news
had come, or what had happened then.
"It was the very next day. That was odd, wasn't it? Though I don't know,
exactly, why it should have seemed odd. It had to happen on some day.
Why not that one? I was glad I should have a good dowry--quite proud to
be of some use to the convent. I didn't think what I might have done for
myself, if I'd been in the world--not then. But afterward, thoughts
crept into my head. I used to push them out again as fast as they
crawled in, and I told myself what a good thing I had a safe refuge,