and took possession, as of a place swept and garnished and long
waiting her coming.

When we knew her better my mother used to say that if she could have
chosen a little girl instead of the little boy that had been I, she
must have chosen Mary Virginia Eustis out of all the world.

Like Judge Mayne's Laurence, she chose to make the Parish House her
second home--for indeed my mother ever seemed to draw children to her,
as by some delightful magic. Here, then, the child learned to sew and
to embroider, to acquire beautiful housewifely accomplishments, and to
speak French with flawless perfection; she reaped the benefit of my
mother's girlhood spent in a convent in France; and Mrs. Eustis was
far too shrewd not to appreciate the value of this. And so we acquired
Mary Virginia.

I watched the lovely miracle of her growth with an almost painful
tenderness. Had I not become a priest, had I realized those spring
hopes of mine; and had there been little children resembling their
mother, then my own little girls had been like this one. Even thus had
been their blue eyes, and theirs, too, such hair of such curling
blackness.

The hours I spent with the little girl and Laurence helped me as well
as them; these fresh souls and growing minds freshened and revived
mine, and kept me young in heart.

"We are all made of dust," said my mother once. "But Mary Virginia's
is star dust. Star dust, and dew, and morning gold," she added
musingly.

"She simply cannot imagine evil, much less see it in anything or in
anybody," I told Madame, for at times the child's sheer innocence
troubled me for her. "One is puzzled how to bring home to this naive
soul the ugly truth that all is not good. Now, Laurence is better
balanced. He takes people and events with a saving grain of
skepticism. But Mary Virginia is divinely blind."

My mother regarded me with a tolerant smile. "Do not worry too much
over that divinely blind one, my son," said she. "I assure you, she is
quite capable of seeing a steeple in daylight! Observe this: yesterday
Laurence angered her, and she seized him by the hair and bumped his
head against the study wall--no mild thump, either! She has in her
quite enough of the leaven of unrighteousness to save her, at a
pinch--for Laurence was entirely right, she entirely wrong. Yet--she
made him apologize before she consented to forgive him, and he did it
gratefully. She allowed him to understand how magnanimous she was in
thus p