ho said that an
Arlesienne must have sat for it. Why it pleased her so she never quite
knew, unless it were by its cool, unrestored devotion, by the faint
smiling in the eyes. Religion with her was a strange yet very real
thing. Conscious that she was not clever, she never even began to try
and understand what she believed. Probably she believed nothing more
than that if she tried to be good she would go to God--whatever and
wherever God might be--some day when she was too tired to live any more;
and rarely indeed did she forget to try to be good. As she sat there she
thought, or perhaps prayed, whichever it should be called: "Let me
forget that I have a body, and remember all the poor soldiers who have
them."

It struck cold that morning in the church--the wind was bitter from the
northeast; some poor women in black were kneeling, and four candles
burned in the gloom of a side aisle--thin, steady little spires of gold.
There was no sound at all. A smile came on her lips. She was forgetting
that she had a body, and remembering all those young faces in the wards,
the faces too of her own children far away, the faces of all she loved.
They were real and she was not--she was nothing but the devotion she
felt for them; yes, for all the poor souls on land and sea, fighting and
working and dying. Her lips moved; she was saying below her breath, "I
love them all"; then, feeling a shiver run down her spine, she
compressed those lips and closed her eyes, letting her mind alone murmur
her chosen prayer: "O God, who makes the birds sing and the stars shine,
and gives us little children, strengthen my heart so that I may forget
my own aches and wants and think of those of other people."

On reaching home again she took gelseminum, her favourite remedy against
that shivering, which, however hard she tried to forget her own body,
would keep coming; then, covering herself with her fur coat, she lay
down, closing her eyes. She was seemingly asleep, so that Augustine,
returning with the hundred single francs, placed them noiselessly beside
the little pile of envelopes, and after looking at the white, motionless
face of her mistress and shaking her own bonny head, withdrew. When she
had gone, two tears came out of those closed eyes and clung on the pale
cheeks below. The seeming sleeper was thinking of her children, away
over there in England, her children and their children. Almost
unbearably she was longing for a sight of them, not se