Kneeling beside her with her hands clasped on the nun's knee, Isabel told her all her struggles; disentangling at last in a way that she had never been able to do before, all the complicated strands of self-will and guidance and blindness that had so knotted and twisted themselves into her life. The nun was amazed at the spiritual instinct of this Puritan child, who ranged her motives so unerringly; dismissing this as of self, marking this as of God's inspiration, accepting this and rejecting that element of the circumstances of her life; steering confidently between the shoals of scrupulous judgment and conscience on the one side, and the hidden rocks of presumption and despair on the other--these very dangers that had baffled and perplexed her so long--and tracing out through them all the clear deep safe channel of God's intention, who had allowed her to emerge at last from the tortuous and baffling intricacies of character and circumstance into the wide open sea of His own sovereign Will. It seemed to the nun, as Isabel talked, as if it needed just a final touch of supreme tragedy to loosen and resolve all the complications; and that this had been supplied by the vision upstairs. There she had seen a triumphant trophy of another's sorrow and conquest. There was hardly an element in her own troubles that was not present in that human Pietà upstairs--treachery--loneliness--sympathy--bereavement--and above all the supreme sacrificial act of human love subordinated to divine--human love, purified and transfigured and rendered invincible and immortal by the very immolation of it at the feet of God--all this that the son and mother in their welcome of pain had accomplished in the crucifixion of one and the heart-piercing of the other--this was light opened to the perplexed, tormented soul of the girl--a radiance poured out of the darkness of their sorrow and made her way plain before her face. "My Isabel," said the old nun, when the girl had finished and was hiding her face again, "this is of God. Glory to His Name! I must ask James' leave; and then you must sleep here to-night, for the mass to-morrow." * * * *