This morning benediction that she found, Laure kept to herself by day, and carried with her until dark. There was no one in the priory to whom she could have confided her pleasure, for there was none in the Abbey that had her love, or, indeed, any love at all, for the world that God had made for Himself and for mankind. The day-tasks also had their pleasures for the novice. She learned, in time, that she was not obliged to fill her recreation hours with embroidery; but that she might sleep, or pray, or work in the garden, or do whatever a quiet fancy should select. So she chose to befriend the soil, and played with it as if it were a tender companion. And after her exercise here, the rest of the day, nones, vespers, supper, confession, and compline, melted away almost unheeded, leaving her at last to the sweet-breathed night, and to a sleep as dreamless and as sound as that of any baby. In this most simple way, without any untoward happening, without her once leaving the priory, the days flowed on, spring melted into summer, and Laure found herself possessed of an infinite and ever-increasing content, the great secret of which probably lay in the fact that every waking hour had its occupation. She had entered her new life in the most beautiful time of the year, and, heedless of this, began, in her delusive happiness, to wonder why, long ago, the whole world had not taken to such existence. She had plenty of time to indulge in dreams,—vague and fragile dreams of the great world and the people dwelling therein, that she should never come to know. But the fact that she could never know them did not come home to her with the force of a deprivation. She did not feel herself to be a hopeless prisoner. She was not professed; and the fact that there still remained to her a free choice easily kept her from any over-vivid perception of the eternal dulness of convent life. Once in two weeks Madame Eleanore came to see her, and if these visits were bitter to the mother, Laure never guessed it. Also, from time to time, the professed nuns would leave the convent for a day or two at a time, on what errands the novices were not told. But Laure knew that similar privileges would be hers after her profession. The summer, in its fulness and beauty, passed away. Purple autumn came and went. And one day, in the first cold weather, Laure was summoned to the Mother-prioress’ room, where she was told a proud thing. It was that, if she chose profession at the end of her novitiate, which would come in the Christmas season, her consecration might take place at the same time, by special permission from the highest power; for, by ordinary ecclesiastic law, she was still many years too young for this consummation of the celibate life. But if she so chose, his Grace the Bishop of St. Nazaire would perform the ceremony of sanctification on the twenty-sixth of December, directly after the forty-eight-hour vigil of the birth of the Christ.