good of me to have wanted you to be let alone to be a nun if you thought it right, because, oh dear, how I should like you to be living near or at the next range! Before I got to know you, it was just the opposite. I hoped you'd get a husband of your own and _quit_; I did. I thought you'd hate your father marrying again, and (if you stayed on here) would be looking disapproval all day long, and perhaps I thought you would not be best pleased at not getting all his money when he died. (I think when people go to Confession they ought to confess things like that. Do they?) Oh, Mariquita, you will be missed. But I'd rather miss you, and know you were being what you felt yourself called away to, than think I had helped to have you interfered with...." Mariquita, reading Sarella's letter, felt something new in her life, something strangely moving, that filled her eyes and heart with something also new--happy tears. The free gift of tenderness came newly to her; and, it may be, she had least of all looked for it from Sarella. "'Do people,' she quoted to herself from Sarella _herself_, 'confess these things?' I will, anyway." It hurt her to think that she who so loved justice and charity, must have been both uncharitable and unjust. But can we agree? Had not Sarella's unforeseen tenderness been her own gift to her? Had Sarella brought tenderness with her from the East? At the stranger's first coming Mariquita had not judged but _felt_ her, and her feeling (of which she herself knew very little) had been instinctively correct while it lasted. CHAPTER XXXV. Of course Mariquita kept her promise of being present at her father's marriage. It had never occurred to her that she could be absent; it was a duty of respect that she owed to him, and a duty of fellow-womanhood that she owed to Sarella. It amused her a little to hear that a certain Mrs. Kane was to be present, in a sort of maternal quality, and that Mr. Kane was to give the bride away as a sort of official father. Mr. Kane might have seen Sarella a dozen times--in the parlor of the convent, which she was much given to frequent. Mrs. Kane had, so far as Mariquita was aware, never seen her at all--except at Mass.