for them when he should be teething.

But Ginx's Baby was in a religious atmosphere, and that is always
surcharged with electricity. His lot must have been above that
of any other human being if he could long have remained in such a
climate unvisited by thunder. The mother had been permitted to
attend at the Home with the same regularity as the milkman, to
discharge her maternal duties. Then with the rise of the
visionary projects just mentioned the gravest doubts began to
agitate the fertile and casuistic mind of the Lady Superior. The
holier her ideal St. Ginx of the future, the more to be deplored
was any heretical taint in the present. Holy mother! Was it not
perhaps eminently perilous to his spiritual purity that an
unbeliever like Mrs. Ginx should bring unconsecrated milk into
the convent to be administered to this suckling of the Church!
In her uneasiness she appealed to Father Certificatus, the
conventual confessor. He gave his opinion in the following
letter:--

"DEAR SISTER SUSPICIOSA,
"The very grave question you have put to me has given me
much anxiety. It could not but do so since it occupied, I knew,
so fully your own holy reflections. I pondered it during the
night while I repeated one hundred Aves on my knees, and I think
the Blessed Virgin has vouchsafed her assistance.

"I understood you to say you thought that the physical health of
the infant, so singularly and miraculously thrown upon your care,
required the offices of his heretic mother, and yet that you felt
how inconsistent it was with the noble future we contemplate for