The nun did not smile. She had been cloistered in the convent many years and, perhaps because she had time to reflect upon them, was wise in the ways of the world. And she knew the reality of even the adolescent struggle. “Cecily, dear, Father Aloysius called it your choice. It is yours. But only ultimately. Events, happenings which we cannot foresee but which come to us under the guidance of God, affect our choice in most matters. Do you see, dear--you can’t decide that now? You must wait and let events shape themselves--and only pray that your vision may be clear and your heart pure.” A look of relief came over Cecily’s face. She nodded. But Mother Fénelon still held her hand. “You are a pretty girl, Cecily,” she went on, “and the world rates prettiness very highly. There are people--there are men--who think it is all that matters--that pleasure is all that matters. Don’t believe them, dear.” “What matters most--pain?” “Neither pleasure nor pain.” The old nun transcended her philosophy in a phrase, “Life matters.” CHAPTER II The Convent of the Sacred Heart was a curiously cloistral structure, situated in a manner quite unanticipated by its founders, in the spreading outskirts of the city itself. It was old as age went in Carrington--its wooden turrets and wasteful curves testified to that--and it had been built at a time when no one dreamed that the fields and pastures and wooded stretches which lay around the convent’s site would be filled within thirty years by prosperous looking residences, sleek lawns and neat hedges. But so it was. As the red brick of the convent walls grew tawny brown with age, the city crept up around them and only the great expanse of its own grounds and that five-foot wall remained to keep the peace of the cloister. But the wall was high and the pine trees within it thickly green in both winter and summer, and the convent, growing richer every year as its property increased in value, gave as little recognition as possible to the modernity outside its gates. It had abandoned its huge windmill for modern plumbing, gradually gas had supplanted lamps and electric wiring supplanted gas--but there the obvious changes stopped. The parlor was still the severe old Victorian parlor of its first furnishing, the study hall still had desks with lid tops and the stone flagging of the corridors was hollowed with the footsteps of thirty-five years. Its shabby permanency gave it peace and aristocracy and this atmosphere was breathed by the nuns themselves, for they, like the place, were cloistered. There were those among them who had been in the convent precincts for thirty years--those whose only voyage outside had been the most inconspicuous and hurried progress from one convent to another, when the Order had transferred them. There were those who came from France, where, until the exile of priests and nuns, they had taught the children of the aristocracy in high walled convents like this one; those