"I was wrong, dear," her mother said, when she was sitting in the parlor with Muriel during recreation on Christmas Eve. "I was quite wrong, dear, to oppose your becoming a nun. Your intention took me so completely by surprise that I never had time to imagine the lines on which you might develop. It is only now when I see you mistress of your own house, as it were, that I realize how perfectly the life suits your temperament." And that night when after Mass the old women, flotsam from life's seat at last forever still, knelt round the crib where lay the image of the infant Saviour, Mary began to apprehend that there was in the Christian religion something more satisfying than the ambiguous promises and performances of crystal-gazers, than the always to be suspected rappings and tappings of mediums. Her mind went back to hours spent with Mademoiselle Lucinge in her gray room at Châteaublanc when the garden was melodious with autumnal birdsong and above the notes of robin-redbreasts Mademoiselle spoke to her about God. This summer she would revisit Châteaublanc, and perhaps in the little church where her old school-mistress had prayed for the woes of France to be lightened she should find that perfect assurance of something beyond which had been denied to her grandmother, but granted to her own daughter. She looked across to where in the flickering candlelight Muriel knelt praying, her eyes turned heavenward and full of tears. Tears for what? For the mere imagination of the reality of that Divine Infant in the manger of Bethlehem. To Muriel's limpid faith had been granted all that motherhood could confer on woman. To her kneeling there belonged a baby that would never grow up to compass her disillusionment, a baby that promised to all who believed in Him immortal life. Hers, hers by the gift of faith. Yet when Mary tried to give herself what she was able to understand had been given to Muriel, she could only perceive the image and miss the reality it tried to express. The faces of the old women kneeling round the crib appeared as meaningless as a row of pippins on the shelf of a store-room. For the sake of a comfortable bed and plenty of food they would have been every bit as willing to kneel round _la planchette_. "Do you believe, dear child, in the possibility of communicating with the dead?" Mary asked her daughter at the first opportunity she was given of talking to her in private. "If you mean, do I believe in spiritualism, I certainly do not," said Muriel severely. "And if there _is_ anything in it, I should say that it was controlled by the spirits of evil. I wish you wouldn't practice such a wretched substitute for worship," she continued. "I cannot understand why people who profess to believe in such hocus-pocus do not submit themselves to the demands of a true religion. It is surely just as easy to accept the doctrines of Christianity as the frauds of mediums."