After this little walk and chat in the garden, life seemed to come back to her with strides.  By the end of August Adele was quite strong again.  The change in her health made a new man of her father; from the day Doctor Prenoveau had said she would not recover, until the day Doctor Chalmers had pronounced her out of danger, he had not entered the doors of the church.  Now all was different; twice a week he went to confession, and almost every day knelt before the altar and asked forgiveness for the dreadful sins of the past.  It had never struck him as being strange that Doctor Chalmers should continue to visit his house after she had recovered.  He had a hazy idea that the doctor’s triumph over his daughter’s disease was the cause of the interest he took in her.  The preposterous thought that anyone should want to marry Adele no more entered his imagination than would the idea of anyone wanting to marry one of the dark-robed nuns at the convent.

Everyone in St. Jerome knew that she was to take the veil.  If his wife at times had fears, she never mentioned them to him.

And Adele?  She was very happy.  Like most French-Canadian women, she was passionately attached to the Church.  At times her happiness was dimmed by the thought that she was not looking forward to taking the veil with that eagerness that she had felt before her illness.  She comforted herself with the thought that the change, somehow, was the result of her illness, and that by and by the old longings would surely return.  Why her heart should beat so when Doctor Chalmers called, and what the meaning was of her looking so eagerly forward to his visiting days, she never stopped to think.

The time of her awakening was at hand!

Had Adele’s thoughts been less engrossed one afternoon, as she sat on the porch, she would have noticed approaching the house, in the middle of the narrow, dusty road that ran to the church, Father Sauvalle, with his arm linked in that of her father’s, both talking eagerly.  The priest’s hand was on the latch of the gate before she raised her head; her face lighted up, and she ran to meet them.  The aged priest had known her all her life, and patted her head with fatherly affection.  As they walked toward the house, he told her, impressively, that his visit this time was solely on her account.

“Yes, solely on your account, solely on your account, blessed be the Virgin!” broke in her father with strange ecstasy.  She could not account for the unhappy feeling which swept over her.

They went into the little parlor, where hung the great carved wooden crucifix, which was said to be the most costly in the town, with the exception of the one in the church.

Scarcely were they seated, when her father began to tell her the great news.  With eyes beaming with religious enthusiasm and pride, he told her how Father Sauvalle had received a letter from the bishop, stating that when the daughter of Hormisdas Frechette had taken the veil at the convent at St. Jerome, the honor should be bestowed upon her of being removed to the convent of the Sacred Heart at Montreal.  Father Sauvalle was to be thanked for this.