Besides, she, who had no belief in chance, would cheer herself by remembering that He had so ordered His patient providence as to bring the girl to the gate of the Church, by such ways as she was so far capable of. He had begun the work; He would not half do it. He would make it, the nun trusted, a double work. For in, half-obstinately, insisting that Sarella must become a Catholic before he married her, the old Spaniard, half-heathen by lifelong habit, had begun to awake to some sort at least of Catholic feeling, some beginning of Catholic practice, for now he was occasionally hearing Mass, and that first lethargic movement of a better spirit in him might, with God's blessing, would, lead to something more genuinely spiritual. The nun attributed those beginnings to the prayers of the old half-breed's daughter. As yet she knew her but little, but already, by the _discretio spiritum_, which is, after all, perhaps only another name for the clear instinct in things of grace earned by those who live by grace, the elderly nun, plain and simple, recognized in Mariquita one of a rare, unfettered spirituality. Sarella had not, at all events consciously, to herself, told her instructress much about her young cousin. "Oh, Mariquita!" she had said, not ill-naturedly, "she lives up in the moon." ("Higher up than that, I expect," thought Sister Aquinas, gathering the impression that Mariquita was not held of much account in the family.) "But she is not an idler?" said the nun. "Oh, not a bit," Sarella agreed with perfectly ungrudging honesty. "An idler! No; she works a lot harder than she ought; harder than she would if I had the arranging of things. Not quite so hard as she used, though, for I have made her father get some help, and he will have to get more if Mariquita leaves us." Perceiving that the nun did not smile, but retreated into what Sarella called her "inside expression," that acute young woman guessed that she might have conveyed the idea that her future stepdaughter was to be sent away on her father's marriage. "There's always," she explained carelessly, "the chance of her marrying. She is handsome in her own way, and I don't think she need remain long unmarried if she chose to marry. Not that _she_ ever thinks of it." ("I expect not," thought Sister Aquinas.) This was about as near to gossip as they ever got. Sarella, indeed, would have liked the nun better if she had been "more chatty." I don't know that Sister Aquinas really disliked chat so long as it wasn't gossip, but the truth was, she did not find the time allowed for each instruction at all superfluously long, and did not wish to let it slip away in mere talk. CHAPTER XXIV. It was only occasionally that Mariquita accompanied Sarella when the latter went to the convent for instruction. On one of those occasions the Loretto Convent near Denver was mentioned, and Sister Aquinas said: "I had a niece there a few years ago--Eleanor Hurst. I wonder if you know her?"