shadow
of the Cross upon the muddy sunlight of the world. It carried the boon
of finality in itself. One might be stopped and put away at any moment,
and nothing would be spoiled, broken, unfinished; and it absolutely
barred out such considerations as were presented by Hamilton Bradley.
There was a time early in her probation when she thought seriously that
if it were not Stephen Arnold it should be this.

She begged to be put on hospital work and was sent for her indiscretion
to teach in the Orphanage for Female Children of British Troops. The
first duty of a novice was to be free of preference, to obey without a
sigh of choice. On the third day, however, Sister Ann Frances,
supervising, stopped at the open schoolroom door to hear the junior
female orphans repeating in happy chorus after their instructress the
statement that seven times nine were fifty-six. I think Hilda saw Sister
Ann Frances in the door. That couldn't go on, even in the name of
discipline, and Miss Howe was placed at the disposal of the chief
nursing Sister at the General Hospital next day. Sister Ann Frances was
inclined to defend Hilda's imperfect acquaintance with primary
arithmetic.

"We all have our gifts," she said. "Miss Howe's is not the
multiplication table, but neither is mine stage-acting." At which the
upper lip lengthened further into an upward-curving smile, and the
Sister Superior remarked cautiously that she hoped Miss Howe would
develop one for making bandages, otherwise----

The depth of what was unusual in Hilda's relation with Alicia
Livingstone--perhaps it has been plain that they were not quite the
ordinary feminine liens--seems to me to be sounded in the tacit
acceptance of Hilda's novitiate on its merits that fell between the two
women. The full understanding of it was an abyss between them, across
which they joined hands, looking elsewhere. Even in the surprise of
Hilda's announcement Alicia had the instinct to glance away, lest her
eyes should betray too many facts that bore upon the situation. It had
never been discussed, but it had to be accepted and occasionally
referred to; and the terms of acceptance and reference made no
implication of Stephen Arnold. In her inmost privacy Alicia gazed
breathless at the conception as a whole; she leaped at it, and caught
it, and held it to look, with a feverish comparison of possibilities. It
was not strange, perhaps, that she took a vivid personal interest in the
essentials that e