Winifred shook her head.
"How calm you are. I am very much excited about it already. You know I like that sort of thing. It isn't decided what we shall give, but probably Pinafore, or Patience, or some old thing. They won't care at Northville. Do say what you think of it, Winifred? Don't be so unecstatic."
Winifred smiled, not very merrily. "I can't get ecstatic," she said.
"I shall not be in it."
"You will not be in it!" Adèle cried. "Oh, why not?"—coaxingly. "Doesn't your father approve of it?—or your mother?—of going off like that, I mean? It will be perfectly proper. We shall be chaperoned."
"Oh, that's not it," said Winifred. "I have left the choir."
Adèle opened her bright eyes wide in astonishment.
"Left the choir!" she exclaimed under her breath, and then leaned back in her chair with a gesture of comical despair of expressing herself.
Winifred could not help laughing at her friend's dismay. She said nothing and Adèle soon recovered herself.
"A little tiff with the leader or somebody?" she queried. "Such things are not unknown to us. I am prepared to take your part, Winnie, right or wrong. But you don't mean you've left for good? Oh, come and sing with us at St. John's—that would be lovely!"
Winifred girded herself mentally for her task. She and lively Miss Forrester had never discussed spiritual things together. They spoke freely of their choirs and of church, but that never seemed dissonant with the most frivolous social things. Now as Winifred thought of the real Holy Place and the worship there "in spirit and in truth," it seemed difficult to speak of it. She began bravely, and began at the beginning, with Mr. Bond's sermon. She rehearsed many of the things that he said, and told frankly of her own conviction of the truth and how it troubled her. Adèle listened gravely and with a sympathetic moisture in her eyes as Winifred told, with little hitches in her voice and evident effort at self-control, of her determination to leave the theater of her unreal worship, and then of the way she had found into the real presence of God and of His forgiveness. She paused here, and Adèle put her arms impulsively about her and kissed her.