merit. Noemi has received a letter from
her friend Jeanne Dessalle, and says she is in need of your help."

"Call her," said he.

Noemi came. A slight cloud had gathered that day between Giovanni and
herself. As rarely happened, they had conversed on religion. Noemi clung
blindly to her own religion, and disliked discussions. Notwithstanding
her tenderness for Maria, and her affectionate respect for Giovanni,
she feared she should lean more towards the scepticism of Jeanne than
towards the liberal and progressive Catholicism of the Selvas, if
she stopped to examine the reasons and nature of her own belief. This
Catholicism appeared to her a hybrid thing, and she had perhaps learned
from Jeanne to consider it such; for Jeanne, in moments of nervous
irritability, defended her own scepticism with acrimony against that
faith which, because it shone with spirituality and truth, might prove
formidable to her. Noemi was always suspicious, not of her sister, but
of Giovanni, fearing he would attempt to convert her, and her suspicion
had that day been apparent when, discussing the confessional, she had
several times answered him very sharply. Then Giovanni had reminded her,
gently and gravely, that error harboured unconsciously, in the sincere
and pure desire of truth, is innocent in the eyes of God, but that if
a sentiment foreign to that desire have any part in the repulsion of
truth, then sin alone is the outcome. This argument wounded Noemi more
deeply still. She had been on the point of asking her brother-in-law by
what right he was acting as vice-divine judge. She controlled herself,
however, and let the discussion drop.

Upon thinking it over afterwards, she regretted her sullen silence, not
so much because Giovanni's words had affected her views, as because she
was aware of the sorrow the religious opinions he professed brought him,
and because she saw how depressed his spirits were. This was one reason
why--when she was called to him, and entreated by her sister to show him
much affection--she resolved, for once, to be unfaithful to Jeanne. Of
what Jeanne had written to her under the seal of secrecy she had told
Maria only as much as was absolutely necessary. Jeanne, still suffering
both physically and mentally, had heard of the "Saint of Jenne," who was
healing bodies and souls, and she besought Noemi to go to Jenne and see
this Saint, and then to write to her about him. Now Noemi could not
go to Jenne alone, she mus