Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/249

 In the days that followed, the influence of Sister Cuthbert, always benign, had in it in the sickroom a new element which even the most careless of the girls felt strongly. In the past she had helped, strengthened, and comforted. Now she seemed to uplift as well—to bear others upward by the gentle force of her own spiritual ascent. If there had been any criticism of her in the old days, among those most severe of critics, the school-girls, it was that she was visionary.

"She is not human enough; she is not one of us," they had said. "She lives in a rarefied atmosphere. Her sympathy is not the sympathy of understanding; it is sympathy in the abstract—a regret over something she has never known and only half gets."

Groping around now in their puzzled minds for an explanation of the change in her, they decided that the new element was a human one—the sympathy of perfect understanding. But with it was an increase of the spiritual quality which had always characterized the young nun.

"She is more ecstatic in her moods than ever," said May Iverson, slowly, "and yet, somehow, she is more of us. What an atmosphere she gives out! Her mere presence is like a prayer. The expression is not new,