"What! Will you not join us at our Christmas feast?" kindly persisted the abbess.
"Indeed, it is impossible! I will rest on my cot for a few minutes, and then I will go and take my poor little Marie Perdue on my bosom and rock her to sleep. I hear her fretting now; and when I hush her cries, she also soothes my heartache."
"I will send you something; and I will come to you, before vespers," said the abbess, kindly, as she glided away from the room.
Salome lay alone on the cot, with closed eyes and folded hands, praying for light to see her duty and strength to do it.
She expected, in answer to her earnest prayers, that scales should fall from her eyes, and impressions pass from her heart, and that she should see her love in monstrous shape and colors, and be able to thrust him from her heart. Instead of which, she saw him purer, truer, nobler, than ever before. With this perception came a sweet, strange peace and trust which she could not comprehend, and did not wish to cast off.
She arose and went into the infants' dormitory, and took up the youngest and feeblest of the babes—the one which, on her very first visit, had so appealed to her sympathies, and which she had adopted as her own.
This child, like many others in the asylum, had no known story.
A few days before Christmas, late in the evening, a bell had been rung at the main door of the Infants' Asylum.
The portress who answered it found there a basket containing an infant a few weeks old. It was cleanly dressed and warmly wrapped up in flannel; but it had no scrap of writing, no name, nor mark upon its clothing by which it might ever be identified.
The portress took it into the dormitory, where it was tenderly received and cared for by the sisters on duty there.