"_I_ suggested," she told her cousin, "the same gray fur as mine. But I daresay a brown fur will suit your coloring better, and it's _younger_. Anything gray (in the fur line) can be worn with mourning, and nothing's so elderly as mourning." It was the first present her father had ever given Mariquita, and she thanked him with a warmth of gratefulness that ought to have made him ashamed. But Don Joaquin was not subject to the unpleasant consciousness of shame. On the contrary, he thought with less complacence of Mariquita's thanks than of the fact that he had given her a necessary winter garment at a profit--for he had taken the other furs to the store and received for them a substantial cash payment over and above the clearing of the charges for making up and lining the commoner skins of which the winter jacket was made. "I wonder," thought Sarella, "what that lining is? It looks silky, but I'm sure it isn't silk. I daresay it's warmer. And after all, Gore can get it changed for silk when it's worn out; the fur will outlast two linings at least. It's not so delicate as mine. I'm afraid mine'll _flatten_. I must look to that." CHAPTER XXIII. Meanwhile the instructions did proceed, and Sarella did not mind them much. Perhaps she was not always attending very laboriously--she had a good deal to think of; but she listened with all due docility, and with quite reasonable, if not absorbed, interest; and by carefully abstaining from asking questions, did not often betray any misunderstanding of the nun's explanations, for it was by one of the nuns that all but the preliminary instructions were given. Sarella rather liked her, deciding that she was "a good sort," and, though neither young nor extremely attractive, she was "as kind as kind," and so intensely full of her subject that Sarella could not help gathering a higher appreciation of its importance. In Sarella the earnest expounder of Catholic doctrine and practice had no bigotry and not much prejudice to work against; only a thick crust of ignorance, and perhaps a thicker layer of natural indifference. The little she had heard about the Catholic Church was from Puritan neighbors in a very small town of a remote corner of New England, and if it had made any particular impression, must have been found unfavorable; but Sarella had been too little interested in religion to adopt its rancors, her whole disposition, easy, self-indulgent and material, being opposed to rancor as to all rough, sharp, and uncomfortable things. Perhaps the nun was hardly likely to overcome the indifference, and perhaps she knew it. But she prayed for Sarella much oftener than she talked to her, and had much more confidence in what Our Lord Himself might do for her than in anything that she could. "After all," she would urge, "it is more Your own business than mine. I did not make her, nor die for her. Master, do Your own work that I cannot."