“Yes. I have penances. I do them as I am told. The _Chemin de la Croix_—all round the church.—It is very tiring—dragging my _prie dieu_.” Giles went on laughing;—“Is it? By Jove! And your first communion? Weren’t you prepared for that?” “Yes. But that was five years ago. I was only a child then. I have altered my opinion of many things since then.” How much Giles found her still a child she heard in his laughter as he asked on: “But what right have you to say you aren’t a pagan? What right have you to call yourself a Catholic?” “I have been baptized,” said Alix. “I have been confirmed. I go to confession, and to Mass, at least at Easter. Most certainly I am a Catholic. You might as well say I was not French because I did not believe in the Republic as to say I am not a Catholic because I don’t believe in heaven. One is, or one is not. It is a question of being born so.” “I see. I see.” Giles was looking down at her, so amused, yet also, she felt, touched by what she said. They entered the little door in the garden-wall. “There’s something to be said for that way of looking at it,” he owned. “It puts it neatly. It explains all sorts of things, in Catholicism and in France. You are a wonderful people, Alix.” CHAPTER VII Of all her new experiences Alix most enjoyed “The Messiah.” The village choir was a feeble enough little affair, its energy concentrated in Giles’s disciplined, sustaining baritone and the robust sopranos of Ruth, Rosemary, and the postmistress. The tenors were almost non-existent, and the altos, among whom Alix was placed at once, terribly weak. But the doctor’s daughter, at the piano, accompanied so accurately, Mrs. Bradley, gentle and absorbed, with her wand, conducted so carefully, that it was a pleasure to sing, and the grave exultant music wove itself deeply into Alix’s impressions of the new life. It made her think of Giles and of his mother, and of Toppie, too. It seemed to go with them; just as it seemed to go with the walk home by lantern-light, and even with the cheerful family supper afterwards where Giles boiled eggs over the fire, and Mrs. Bradley made cocoa on a spirit-lamp. The High School, to which she and Ruth and Rosemary bicycled every day, was at once familiar and alien. It was like the _Lycée_, in shape, as it were; but not in texture. Hockey could not give it the flavour that it lacked. The girls, all of them, were too much like Ruth and Rosemary. They lived, she felt, in what they did, not in what they thought. They had a sense of fun, but no sense of irony, and with their sharp-cut edges, their hardy colour, they seemed to repel any suggestion of mystery, in life or in themselves. They accepted her at once. They seemed to like her, just as Ruth and Rosemary did. But she felt that anybody else who could hold a hockey stick and tell the truth would have done just as well.