ht. I hoped. No, I knew!" And he smiled contentedly. "The stars
have ceased to desire the moth, a well-known phenomenon which often
upsets the solar system. The moth has lost its attraction. The stars
have found each other."

"We have found each other," Mary said, "and I believe--I believe that we
have found ourselves, our real selves."

"You have found yourselves and each other," echoed the cure, "which
means that you have found God. I have no more fear"--and he waved a hand
toward the towered building down below, set on fire by the sun--"no more
fear of the moth."

XXV

They stayed on, after their friend had come to them; and all three sat
together in the arbour, while the shadows hewed quarries of sapphire
deep into the side of the mountains; and in the violet rain of twilight
everything on land and water that was white seemed to become magically
alive: the fishing boats turned to winged sea birds: the little waves
were lilied with foam blossoms: the sky became a garden of stars.

When Mary first went to live at the convent, an impressionable child of
eight, one of the nuns told her that the stars were spirits of children
in heaven's nursery, sent out to play in the sky, that their mothers
might see them and be glad: and the moon was their nurse. She repeated
the legend to Vanno and the cure, and said that she had been brought up
from childhood in a convent school, because she had lost her mother, and
her father had gone away to India; but she did not say that she had
taken the first steps toward becoming a nun. She wanted Vanno to hear
this first, when they were alone together. Not that she feared the
knowledge might endanger his love for her. In this immortal hour it
seemed that nothing could ever again come between them.

"That accounts for what she is, does it not?" the cure exclaimed,
turning to Vanno with the joy of the discoverer. "A convent school! Now,
my son, what puzzled you in her is made clear. I, at least, might have
guessed. A girl brought up by a band of good and innocent cloistered
women must always be different from other girls. She should not be let
out to wander alone in the world without guardians, as this child has
been; for without a guide a few mistakes at the beginning are certain.
Now, she has made all the mistakes she need ever make; and she is no
longer alone."

"Never again!" Vanno said fervently, pressing her hand under the blue
cover of dusk.

It did not occur to Mary