"Do you?" said Joan.
"Sure thing! And Major's a perfect gentleman always. Don't you fret."
Joan mounted quietly to her room, and undressed in the dark. She did not want to see her face in the mirror, afraid of the disgust, the loathing, that must be reflected there—Her father—drunk! The man to whom her mother had given her love and her life, tipsily furnishing amusement for a woman who judged gentlemen by the way they carried their liquor!...
She recalled one other time when she had seen her father in his present condition. She remembered her mother's stricken, tragic face as she hurried him out of sight, explaining tremulously, "Daddy's ill, darling. No games with Daddy to-night—he's ill."
"But he wants to play! Look, mamma, he wants to play!" the small Joan had insisted, to no avail.
And when this strangely interesting Daddy was safe in bed, with Ellen Neal mounting guard, Joan had been hurried out to the nearest church (which happened to be a Catholic one, for Mary's was a casual sort of religion that boasted neither creed nor prejudice); and there, before a statue where little lamps burned, the child had prayed hard, as she was bid, that her father might never be ill in just that way again.
"God may listen to you, even if He's tired of listening to me!" the mother had whispered, desperately.
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.