It was the Sunday after our arrival. The village was two kilometres distant, and only one mass--high mass--was celebrated. Louise informed us of the fact, and at what she judged the proper moment she called to us to set out. Grandfather, who never went to church, raised a disinterested objection. “Public places are the most unhealthy. Beware of the epidemic.” “There has not been a single case of typhus in the whole valley,” said Louise triumphantly. “Very well,” said grandfather, filling his morning pipe. I then informed my sister that I had planned to take a walk and regretted that I could not escort her. She looked at me in astonishment, such astonishment that I can still see the surprise in her limpid eyes. “What, you are not going to mass, Francis? There is only one.” “No,” I replied with my most assured manner. “It isn’t possible!” Her eyes, those limpid eyes, at once filled with tears, and I remembered the first mass that I had missed. Pride forbade me to yield, pride and also that new, vague belief which my imagination had built up. Louise pushed Nicola and Jamie before her, and turned to me, her book of hours in her hand, still hoping to move me. “I beg you, come with us.” If she had added, “to please me,” perhaps I would have yielded, so alarmed did she appear. She no doubt would have deemed that plea unworthy of its purpose. This time I refused still more emphatically. “I shall be obliged to write to mamma,” she urged as a last argument. “As you please.” She did not, however, carry out her threat. Her sense of delicacy warned her not to add to our parents’ anxieties in the midst of their battle with the pestilence. On the contrary, she doubled her attention to me, trying to win me to her, to gain my friendship, my confidence. With innate art she became an improvised mother of the family, ever trying to bring us together, to group us, warring against the isolation in which I delighted. When a letter came she would call us together and read it aloud to us. We received letters from home very regularly, and they forwarded Mélanie’s to us from the hospital in London, where she was caring for the sick; Bernard’s from his expedition in Tonkin; Stephen’s, who was completing his theological studies in Rome. Through her the absent ones visited us, and if it had depended only upon her we should have carried on at the Alpette the same life as at home. It was precisely that which revolted me, and I rose in rebellion against the twenty-year-old will which, with unlooked for tenacity, went counter to mine.