This exercise was one which Frances had always viewed with some slight apprehension.
The newly invested novice, bearing a lighted candle, made the round of the community, each nun and lay-sister standing at her stall in the chapel, also the bearer of a lighted candle, and exchanged with each the symbolical kiss of peace.
A nervous dread of the effect of so many lighted wax candles on inflammable veils and music scores sent the blood to Frances’ head and made her slow progress round the chapel a painful one, but the older nuns proved expert at holding veils out of possible contact with candle-grease, and moreover to her great relief, the draught of these repeated salutations extinguished several tapers, including her own.
As she returned thankfully to her prie-dieu, Mrs. Mulholland, who had mysteriously become possessed of a full-sized candle, leant forward and determinedly applied its flame to Frances’ cold and extinguished taper.
Frances smiled at her gently, and Mrs. Mulholland subsided into her seat again and blew her nose with a vigorous, trumpet-like sound denoting considerable emotion. Then the Prior read the concluding prayers and placed upon Frances’ head the wreath of artificial white roses, where it balanced insecurely until Mrs. Mulholland again sprang from her seat and affixed it to the novice’s veil with a couple of safety-pins apparently produced by miraculous means from her person.
The Te Deum pealed through the chapel in conclusion, and then, as the community filed out in the customary order, two by two, Frances was left for a few moments to the solitude and quiet which her whole soul craved.
Her head bent and her hands tightly clasped, she made her earnest ardent thanksgiving, her simple, fervent resolution to try and be worthy of all that she had received, her tender, childlike petitions for those whom she loved, for all those for whom she had promised to pray, for that religious order which she was hereafter to count, in all its scattered branches, as her earthly home.
She lost herself in a dreamy contentment that was half contemplation and half the mental inertia following on prolonged physical and emotional strain. It was almost as though rousing herself from sleep that she heard a whispered summons to the parlour, and rose obediently to follow the lay-sister out of the chapel.
Scarcely less dreamlike was the afternoon spent in Rosamund’s company, when Frances took her once or twice round the tiny garden, showed her, in obedience to Mère Pauline’s recommendations, the poor school and the portion of the house reserved for lady boarders, and returned with her to the parlour, where Lady Argent, serenely voluble, was entertained by such of the nuns as could spare quarter of an hour.
“I can’t see your part of the house, and where you sleep, can I?” asked Rosamund.