Yet Cis was growing steadily happier in Miss Braithwaite’s home, and she knew that Miss Braithwaite thoroughly enjoyed having her there. Her sense of humor, which never could long be downed, was coming to the surface again; she made her hostess laugh with chuckling delight over her nonsense. Once more she was growing to be the frank, boyish Cis, who was excellent company and attractive to all sorts of people. With this revival of her old charm, Cis was acquiring the charm of one who lives intimately in the best companionship. She read eagerly, with Miss Braithwaite to guide her choice of books; she listened no less eagerly, and began to share talk as valuable as her reading. She met interesting people, and heard discussed measures of great import, helpful to individuals and to her country. She began to drift up to the edges of these things and to help in them, ever so little, but learning to do, to plan; being, unknown to herself, inducted into the great things now waiting on every hand for lay men and women to perform.
Father Morley came often to see Miss Braithwaite; he relied on her acumen, her remarkable powers for help in his undertakings. He, a tired man, not particularly strong, delighted in the refreshment he received in her restful library, from her own wit and gracious talk; from her brain which understood at a half word much that he could not say. She put at his disposal all her resources of talent and wealth and social position.
Father Morley was himself a person of rare cultivation of mind; he had been an omnivorous reader from his childhood; his remarkable education began long before his seminary days, exceeded textbooks.
He found Cis interesting; he recognized in her that capacity to soar which so far surpasses the sufficient goodness of excellent souls, and he made it his affair to help Miss Braithwaite to hold up Cicely’s opening wings. She grew deeply attached to this tenderly kind, austere Jesuit, and yielded herself gratefully to his molding.
Thus the winter swung into its steady pace after the New Year, and Cis was amazed to find that her days were not only peaceful, but full to overflowing, and that they were happy. There was an ache in her heart for Rodney; she did not forget, yet being an honest Cis, she realized that if he were to return to her he would not satisfy her as he had done; that in severing herself from Rodney Moore she had leaped over on to a height beyond him, and that from that hour she had gone on ascending.
How strange it was that in doing right she had gained in time the good that had been promised her only for eternity! There was that ache in her heart for Rodney—what woman would not mourn a lost love, perhaps the more that she began to see the loss in its true light—but the Cis who had been for a quarter of a year the inmate of Miss Braithwaite’s house, associated with her and her friends, had grown beyond the girl who had been satisfied with Rodney Moore.
As the winter evenings grew cold and drear, Anselm Lancaster sought no less frequently the cheerful fireside, the laden shelves, the grand piano of Miss Braithwaite’s library; still more the delightful fireside talk of its mistress, whom he admired with all his might.
And Cis herself? Did he find her an attraction? Sometimes Miss Braithwaite thought so, but Cis surely did not. However, she had grown friendly and at ease with Anselm Lancaster, chatted with him, showed him her natural gifts, as well as the supernatural ones developing in her; was her frank, sunny self, and of course Anselm was not so stupid as not to find her likable, admirable. But there was no ground for seeing more in it than that, Miss Braithwaite decided, perhaps with relief.
He talked to Cis of the things which interested him; of his work, his plans. Of his home, which he made a temporary home for those who had left home and relatives for conscience’ sake, who needed a foothold upon which to stand to catch the breath of the new atmosphere when the old had become too vitiated for them to continue to breathe it. Of his Italian classes, his organized effort to hold the immigrant against assault in the new land; of all the ramifications of his lay army to fight against Lucifer, the once-beautiful, the forever subtle and attractive.
Cis listened enkindled.