! Oh, indeed I cannot go, mother. I am utterly unnerved by
what has happened. I hope you will pardon and excuse me," pleaded Salome.

"What! Will you not join us at our Christmas feast?" kindly persisted the
abbess.

"Indeed, it is impossible! I will rest on my cot for a few minutes, and
then I will go and take my poor little Marie Perdue on my bosom and rock
her to sleep. I hear her fretting now; and when I hush her cries, she
also soothes my heartache."

"I will send you something; and I will come to you, before vespers," said
the abbess, kindly, as she glided away from the room.

Salome lay alone on the cot, with closed eyes and folded hands, praying
for light to see her duty and strength to do it.

She expected, in answer to her earnest prayers, that scales should fall
from her eyes, and impressions pass from her heart, and that she should
see her love in monstrous shape and colors, and be able to thrust him
from her heart. Instead of which, she saw him purer, truer, nobler, than
ever before. With this perception came a sweet, strange peace and trust
which she could not comprehend, and did not wish to cast off.

She arose and went into the infants' dormitory, and took up the youngest
and feeblest of the babes--the one which, on her very first visit, had so
appealed to her sympathies, and which she had adopted as her own.

This child, like many others in the asylum, had no known story.

A few days before Christmas, late in the evening, a bell had been rung at
the main door of the Infants' Asylum.

The portress who answered it found there a basket containing an infant a
few weeks old. It was cleanly dressed and warmly wrapped up in flannel;
but it had no scrap of writing, no name, nor mark upon its clothing by
which it might ever be identified.

The portress took it into the dormitory, where it was tenderly received
and cared for by the sisters on duty there.

The case was too common a one to excite more than a passing interest.

On the next day after the arrival of the infant, it happened that the
mother-superior brought Salome there on her first visit, when the misery
of the motherless and forsaken infant so moved the sympathies of the
young lady that she immediately took it to her own bosom.

Subsequently, since she had devoted herself to the care of these deserted
babies, she took an especial interest in this youngest and most helpless
of their number.

She named it Marie Perdue, and stood godmother