Joan, gazing into their serene, pure, almost childlike faces, envied them from her heart; but, being Joan, she asked herself wonderingly how they could be so sure it was the will of God to which they resigned themselves. Intelligent, fine-natured women, deliberately turning their backs on life, deliberately closing eyes and ears to what went on in the street just outside their cloister, lest it distract them from contemplation of their immortal souls--Joan shook her head sharply; and putting a veil over her hair, slipped into the chapel, where a voice behind the cloister-screen was repeating the rosary of the Sacred Heart: "Oh, sacred heart of Jesus, burning with love for us, Inflame our hearts with love for Thee." The beautiful voice rose and fell in almost passionate cadence, as if it were pleading. It ceased abruptly; and another, older voice took up the words, with mystic tenderness. There was a faint fragrance in the place--indeed throughout the old building--of incense and dying roses, which Joan always called to herself "the odor of sanctity." It came back to her sometimes poignantly in the most unexpected places. A very old lay-sister, in a white coif and shoes that creaked a trifle, pottered about among the statues of the saints, arranging small lamps and vases of flowers, always dropping as she passed the altar a business-like little curtsey. Now and then a child with a veil over her head would slip in at the door, and genuflect, and sink to her knees for a moment's prayer. Sunlight streamed in, multi-colored, through ruby and purple and amber glass, across the white marble Christ who stood with hands outstretched and head bowed, suffering little children to come unto Him.... Joan, who had been reading Rénan (a fact which would have certainly caused her expulsion from that place had it been known), quoted to herself: "In our bustling civilization, the memory of the life of Galilee has been like the perfume of another world." It seemed to her one of the true miracles that it should indeed have persisted through our bustling civilization, through persecution and indifference, through crass hysterical religiosity, even to this day; if only in such places as her convent school, and little country churches here and there, and in the homes of the very poor. That lovely, pastoral, gentle life of Galilee, exquisite as the name itself--who could not have been good in Galilee? "If Archie had lived then, he would have followed Christ," thought Joan suddenly. "Followed him, and fought for him, too. And he'd never have let the Jews get hold of him!" It was the first time she had thought of her husband in many days....