Miss Vane, however, as it turned out, was as much pleased with Innocent as Innocent was with Miss Vane. After one day with his sister, which, perhaps, in the circumstances, was enough for both, John Vane set off to pay various visits, promising to return again for Innocent, and warning his sister only to keep her apart from “the Frederick Eastwoods” and Mr. Batty’s house in Sterborne. This Miss Vane cheerfully agreed to do without any question; for, certainly, it was very undesirable that a relation of her own should have any intercourse or connexion with Mr. Batty’s daughter. The religious vocation of the mistress of the High Lodge did not make her indifferent to the claims of family. Religious vocations seldom do; a well-born woman is well-born in a Carmelite cloister as well as in a king’s court, and generally thinks quite as much of it in the one region as the other. It seemed accordingly a perfectly simple matter that Innocent should be permitted to accept no invitation from Mrs. Frederick Eastwood; and indeed no such invitation came. Otherwise things went on with the most perfect comfort between the girl and her new relation. She did not talk much, it is true; she was not interested, as Miss Vane expected her to be, in the upper school, where half-a-dozen “daughters of gentlemen” were being educated in one wing of the old house; or the lower school, where children who had no gentility to boast of were being trained in another; or in the orphanage, even though she herself was an orphan, and might have been supposed likely to “take an interest” in the young creatures--girls like herself, who found refuge there. Innocent went through the whole establishment, making no remark. When asked if she liked it, she said Yes: when asked if she was tired, she said No: when asked if she would like to see something more, she said Yes again. She smiled upon the little children, and said _ma sœur_ to the sisters when they spoke to her, which pleased them. She was everything that was docile, gentle, and obedient, and she grew in a few weeks to look stronger and better than she had ever done in her life; but she did not become more communicative. One thing, however, Innocent did which found high favour in everybody’s eyes. She would go and sit for hours together in the little chapel, with her eyes fixed upon the pictured Christ (an old Italian picture, full of true early Italian sentiment for the divine and holy) which was hung over the altar. The chapel was low, like the house, an old Early English building in good repair, but homely as became its date, with low windows, filled with grisaille glass, dim and silvery. Here Innocent would sit, taking no note of time; it felt to her like the little church of the Spina over again; and here, as there, she said “Our Father,” vaguely reverential, and sat in a soft quiescence, scarcely thinking--happy, she knew not why. The habit she thus showed commended her to the community beyond expression.