Mother smiled, and traced the sign of the Cross with her thumb on the uplifted brow. She also murmured a quite unintelligible blessing, then disappeared down the long passage that led to the part of the house reserved for the community.
Zella returned to the recreation-room on the whole well pleased with herself.
To add to her elation, she found that the girls were disposed to treat her with a new friendliness.
"I say, you are lucky," said Dorothy Brady enviously. "You got a whole half-hour, didn't you?"
Zella had had considerably less, owing to Reverend Mother's lack of promptitude in making her appearance, but she saw her advantage and instantly seized it:
"Wasn't it kind of her?" she smiled, thus delicately implying the correctness of Dorothy's conjecture.
"Reverend Mother doesn't often see new girls, either," said Kathleen, the pretty Irish girl whom Zella was disposed to like.
'Are you starting a war Zella ?" laughed one of the younger ones.
Mary McNeill shoved her into silence. Zella felt rather than heard the muttered warning: "Shut up! don't you know she isn't a Catholic, she's a Protestant?"
"Can't Protestants get a vocation?" demanded the infant, unabashed.
"Of course not. Don't be silly." Zella felt annoyed. She had already had serious visions of the young heiress of Villetswood renouncing all the pomps and riches of this world and adopting the becoming veil and habit of the Order, and she was indignant at having it supposed that she, as a Protestant, was debarred from what these convent girls evidently considered as the highest summit of attainment in this life.
Her unformulated thought might have been translated into a determination that she must conform to the standards of her surroundings at all costs; and not only conform, but find herself placed considerably above the average line of conformity.
She prayed that night, with a strong sense of her own humility and desire for Truth, " Lord, increase my faith.'' Her complacency was only disturbed by a tiny involuntary petition that she found herself murmuring into the pillow when she had finished drawing the Almighty's attention to her state of spiritual receptiveness:
"And please do let Reverend Mother take an interest in me."
XIV
AM I never to make a real friend?" thought Zella despairingly when she had been at the convent some time, and found herself no nearer to this favourite vision of her school days.
Intimacies among the pupils were not encouraged. "Charity " might be, and was, enforced by every pious precept of the nuns, but it must be practised indiscriminately, as it were, and in equal measure towards all alike. Tête-à-tête conversations were absolutely forbidden, nor was any opportunity afforded for such in the ordered monotony of the days.
Zella was by this time on terms of easy chaff with most of her companions, having rapidly caught the tone prevalent amongst them, and learnt to alternate, as they did, between the free-and-easy camaraderie implied in flat contradiction or noisy argument, and the matter-of-course good-will expressed in an earnest request for prayers about a frightfully special intention.
For some time Zella was utterly in the dark as to what an "intention" might be, but characteristically uttered an emphatic assent without making any inquiry.
She was enlightened one day by Kathleen.
"I'll tell you what my intention is, if you'll promise not to tell a soul," she whispered, after the customary formulas had been exchanged between them.
"Oh, do tell me!"
"Well, I want it simply frightfully badly, so you must pray like anything. It's this." Kathleen drew a long breath. "You know Mother Monica takes the violin pupils? Well, I've written to ask my father if I may learn the violin next term, and there's just a chance he may say yes. Just think of having a whole hour's lesson with her once a week! I'm simply praying to everyone I can think of. St. Cecilia ought to get it for me, oughtn't she? as she's the patroness of music."
Zella looked at her in mute amazement. The convent perspective still had power to astonish her, and the sensation was so very evident in her face that Kathleen's own expression of hopeful eagerness changed, as she murmured hastily:
"Of course I forgot—I suppose it isn't exactly the same thing for you. You don't have saints in the Protestant Church, do you?"
It was not a question, Zella felt, but a statement of fact, and as such it humiliated her.
It was mortifying to know that even the smallest child in the school looked upon her with pity or curiosity as a "Protestant," and that the humblest lay Sister in the community doubtless thought it the merest act of common charity to murmur an occasional prayer for her conversion.
No one, however, endeavoured to lure her into the Fold, and there were times when Zella wearied heartily of this discretion, and thought that the Jesuitical intrigues predicted by Mrs. Lloyd-Evans would have been infinitely preferable to the continuance of this monotonously impersonal atmosphere.
The regularity of convent life was scarcely less trying to her than its detachment, and it was with proportionate eagerness that Zella looked forward to an event which apparently loomed enormous on the convent horizon.
This was spoken of as " Reverend Mother's Feast" by the children, and by the nuns, with a slightly emotional inflection, and even, in extreme cases, a moistened glance, as " Our dear Mother's Feast-day."
"What are you going to do for our dear Mother on her feast, children?" inquired Mother Veronica one evening at recreation. "I think it's time we began our spiritual bouquet."
In quality of her position as First Mistress, she habitually addressed the pupils as " we." She was not popular, and most of the girls instinctively resented it.
"That will give us a whole month," observed Mary McNeill with satisfaction. "We can get heaps of things done by that time. Doesn't Reverend Mother like acts of mortification best?"
"I've begun already," proudly announced Dorothy Brady, one of Reverend Mother's devotees. "I've done fourteen acts already."
The others looked impressed, and one or two appeared rather envious. Even Mother Veronica* remarked, with unusual cordiality:
"Well done, Dorothy! I like to hear that; it shows the right spirit, dear. Now, I've got a paper all ready here, and if I pin it up in the hall to-morrow you can all keep count on that."
"Oh, but, Mother," objected Kathleen, "then they'll all be added up together, and we shan't know who's done most. Do let's each keep count separately, and then give in the numbers at recreation some evening, and add them up all together, like we did last year."
Zella, to whom most of this conversation was almost incomprehensible, looked with great curiosity at the paper in Mother Veronica's hand. It was inscribed list-wise with various pious practices, and included such unfamiliar- terms as "Acts," "Ejaculatory Prayers," and even "Hours of Silence."
The whole was headed
