It was because God had listened that Joan was sent later to a Catholic convent. Mary Darcy's was not the nature to forget favors; and it occurred to her that there might be worse protectors for a girl who must one day be motherless than Our Lady of Sorrows. Not every faith is strong enough to go through life without some creed to cling to. Mary had offered her child what she could. Lying there in the darkness, Joan understood. She wished that she might have been able to take what her mother offered. She yearned for the anodyne of simple, unquestioning prayer, for the mesmeric comfort that comes to the believing from the slipping of rosary beads between the fingers; above all, for the right to kneel unrecognized in a quiet confessional and learn from some priest wiser than she in the ways of men where her duty lay and how she was to follow it. The confessional is perhaps the secret of the hold the oldest of Christian churches keeps upon a world which would seem to have outgrown it. That is a self-reliant nature indeed which does not sometimes feel the need of guidance at once human and detached. But Joan's creed and confessional alike were contained in her troubled young head; and where a happier woman would have wept and said her prayers, she set herself sternly to the task of thinking. It seemed to her that throughout the past weeks she had been shirking an issue, deliberately drugging her wits with anything that came to hand. Now she faced conditions squarely. There must be no more drifting. She focused an unsparing vision upon her father. Already there were changes apparent in him, signs of deterioration not entirely physical. His features seemed slightly blurred from their fine chiseling, there was a relaxed look about the lips and chin, about the very poise of his figure. He had lost a little of that indefinable something which gave him distinction, even in the days when the women of his family tried in vain to keep him pressed and unspotted. Prosperity was not going to be good for Richard Darcy. Joan pronounced ruthless judgment upon her father: "He's done for!" And, as Ellen had warned her, it was none of her business.... What then was her business? Clearly, to keep from being "done for" herself.