The priory-convent of the Virgins of the Magdalen was as old as any nunnery in Brittany of its repute. It had been founded in the early days of the tenth Louis of France and his good lady of Burgundy, long before the death of the last of the Dreux lords of the dukedom. It was celebrated for more than its age, however; for through three centuries it had held in ecclesiastic Brittany, for its wealth, its exclusiveness, and, above either of these things, its unswerving chastity, a place as unique as it was gratifying. In the year 1381 no breath of scandal had ever disturbed its fragrant atmosphere. Moreover, though this was a fact not much regarded by people in authority, it was a remarkably comfortable little house, of excellent architecture and ample room for the practice of any amount of worship. Its situation, however, was lonely. It stood nearly at the end of the Rennes coast road, on the outskirts of a thick forest, twenty miles from the town of St. Nazaire-by-the-sea, and twelve from the Chateau of Le CrÉpuscule. And it was here, in this pleasant if austere retreat, that many a noble lady of Laval and CrÉpuscule had ended her youth and worn her life away in the endeavor to attain undying sanctity.

On a certain afternoon in this mid-spring of 1381, the very day, indeed, that Lord Gerault took to the Rennes road to ease his ennui, a little company of nuns sat out in the convent garden, embroidering away their recreation time. The day was exquisite: sunny, a little chilly, its breeze laden with the rare perfume of awakening summer. The garden, at this season of the year, was a place of wondrous beauty, redolent of rich, pregnant soil, and all shimmering with the misty green of tender grass and countless leaf-buds, from the midst of which a few flowers, pale primroses and crocuses and a hyacinth or two, peered forth, starring the new-planted beds with the first fruits of this new union of earth and sky.

The spirit of the spring ruled supreme over all natural things. Only the creatures of God, the self-consecrated nuns, sat in the midst of this wonder of the young world, untouched by it. Heedless to the uttermost of this greatest of worldly blessings, they sat plying their needles in and out of their bright-colored, ecclesiastical fabrics, listening, in their dull and dreamy way, to the voice of one of their number who was droning out to them for the thousandth time the old and long-familiar laws of their order, expressed in the “Rhymed Rule of St. Benedict.” One only among them seemed not of their mood. This was a young girl, white-robed like all the rest, her unveiled head proclaiming her novitiate. As became her station she bent decorously to her task, and it had taken a close observer to see and read all the little signs she gave of consciousness of the world around her, the green, growing things, and the liquid bird-songs that came trilling out of the forest near at hand. Probably not even the most skilled of readers could have recognized all the meaning in the long, slow looks, half wondrous and half probing, with which, every now and again, she traversed the circle of faces about her. Her self-restraint was very nearly flawless, and was successfully maintained throughout the long period of recreation; so that not one of her companions guessed the relief she felt when the first clang of the vesper-bell roused them from their trance-like dulness. But the young girl wondered a little at herself when she perceived that her brows were damp with the sweat of the constraint.

At this time Laure of Le CrÉpuscule was sixteen years of age, and pretty as a flower to look upon. She was slim and white-faced, with immense, limpid brown eyes that were wont to move rather slowly, and burnished brown hair hanging in twists to her knees: an object for men to rave over, had any man worth so calling ever set eyes upon her. She was young enough and pure enough to be of unquestioning innocence; and, until now, the fiery life in her had found sufficient outlet in unlimited bodily exercise. She had seen nothing of real life, and never dreamed of the talent she possessed for it. It was from her own heart that the wish to consecrate herself to the eternal worship of God had come; for she believed that in this way she should find a haven for those terrible and fathomless mental storms of which she had weathered many in her young life, and of which her own mother never so much as dreamed. Utterly ignorant of her real self, she was yet a girl of strong intellect, of great versatility, of over-weening passions, and withal as feminine a creature as the Creator ever fashioned. Both her temperament and her appearance more resembled the dwellers of the far South—Provence or even Navarre—than the children of the rugged, chilly shores of northern Brittany; for her skin had the dark, creamy pallor of the South, and her eyes held none of the keen fire that glows in the North, while her hair grew low above her smooth, white brow.

Laure’s temperament was dramatically mobile. She adapted herself almost unconsciously to any mode or situation of life, and this, though she did not know it, was all that she was doing now. It was with real, if subdued pleasure that she went through the services of the day. From matins, which, at this period of the year, began at the cheerless hour of four in the morning, till compline, at eight in the evening, when the church bell tolled the end of another day of prayer, Laure’s nature was under a kind of religious spell, which she and those about her had joyfully interpreted as a true vocation.

The first eleven days of Laure’s convent life passed away in comparative calmness; and she found no weariness in them. On the twelfth, Madame Eleanore rode in from Le CrÉpuscule to see her daughter. She was admitted to the convent as speedily as if the little lay sister had known the devouring eagerness of the mother-heart; and because she was a lady of consequence, and because she was known to be very generous to the Church, and especially because the Bishop of St. Nazaire was her close friend, she was not left to wait in the reception-room, but conducted straight to the Prioress’ cell.

MÈre Piteuse received Madame Eleanore with anxious cordiality. After their greetings the guest seated herself, and was obliged to keep silence for a moment before she could ask quietly,—

“And Laure, Reverend Mother,—how fares my child? Is she content with you?” Eleanore’s heart throbbed with unconfessed hope as she asked this question. For if Laure was not content, she might return at will to the Castle, her home, and her mother’s heart.

But the Prioress returned Eleanore’s look with a smile of satisfaction. “In a moment Laure will come hither. I have sent for her. Then thou shalt learn from her own lips how well her life goes. Never, I think, hath our priory received a new daughter that showed herself so happy in her vocation. We shall call her name Angelique at her consecration.”

Eleanore felt her body grow cold, and her head swim. Her face, however, betrayed nothing. Her little girl, then, was really gone! Laure, the wild bird, was tamable. She—could she become “Angelique”?

Neither madame nor the Prioress spoke again till there was a sound of gentle footsteps in the corridor, followed by a light tap on the wooden door of the cell.

“Enter!” cried the Prioress; and Laure came quietly in.

First of all she bowed to MÈre Piteuse. Then, as Eleanore involuntarily held out her arms, the girl went into them, and kissed her mother with a warmth and a sweetness that perhaps Eleanore had not known from her before. At the same moment the Prioress rose quietly, and left the room. The instant that she was gone, Eleanore seized the girl in a still closer embrace, and held her tightly and more tightly to her breast.

“Laure, my darling! Laure, my sweet child! how hath my heart yearned for thee! How hath thy name lain ever on my lips while I slept, and been enshrined in my heart by day!”

The young girl’s arms wound themselves about her mother’s neck, and she laid her head upon that shoulder where it had been wont to rest in her babyhood. And Laure sighed a little, not unhappily, but like a child tired of play.

“Laure, wilt thou remain here in the convent? Art thou happy? Dost thou wish it, or wilt thou come home again to CrÉpuscule?”

A sudden image of the gray Castle, with its vast hall, and the great fire blazing in the chimney-place within, and all the well-known figures assembled there for a meal,—Alixe, Gerault, the demoiselles and young squires headed by Courtoise, and the burly men-at-arms that had played with her and carried her about as a little child,—all the long-familiar, comfortable scenes of her old life came before the girl’s eye. And then—then she drew a little breath and answered her mother, unfaltering: “’Tis beautiful here, and sweet and holy withal. I am content, dear mother. I will remain.”

“And hast thou, then, the vocation in thy heart, whereby some souls are claimed of God from birth to death, and find the utmost of their happiness in His communion?”

Laure’s great eyes fixed themselves upon the mother’s sad face as she replied again, very softly: “Yea, my mother. That, from my heart, do I believe.”

Eleanore sighed deeply, and then quickly smiled again. “Think not that I mourn, my daughter, for having yielded thee up to the Church. May this blessed spirit remain in thee, bringing thee everlasting peace.”

Then, while Laure still clung to her, the mother herself put the closely clasped arms away from her neck, and drew the novice to her feet. “Now, my Laure, I must go. But my thoughts are still left with thee.”

“But thou wilt come, mother?—In ten days’ time thou wilt come to me again?”

“Yea, sith it is permitted by the rules that I see thee once more, I will surely come,” she answered quietly.

“Laure will greatly rejoice at thy coming,” said the Prioress, gently, from the doorway.

So Eleanore renewed her promise, and shortly after rode away from the priory gate, into the thick wood through which ran the road to CrÉpuscule.

Her mother’s visit brought Laure two days of extremest homesickness and yearning. Then she regained her independence, and began to find a new delight in her surroundings. The perfect peace of it, the infinite, delightful detail of worship, with its multifarious candle-points, and its continual clouds of fragrant incense, all wrought together into a life of undeviating regularity, brought to the novice a sense of peculiar safety and freedom from vexation or care that was quite new to her, for all her youth. The day began with matins, repeated by each nun alone in her cell. Laure had been given a room in a corner of the priory, at the very end of the corridor of novices, and she gained therefrom an added sense of exclusiveness and seclusion. She had not once been late in her answer to the matins bell, and the mistress of novices, passing Laure’s cell on her first round of the day, had never failed to find her praying. Laure came of a pious house, and had known her prayers, all the forms of them, long before she entered the priory. They required no thought in the repetition, and therefore there was many a morning when she played the parrot at her desk, either too sleepy, or too much occupied with thoughts and dreams, to heed the familiar addresses to God. This was not entirely a fault, perhaps. The mornings came very early in these days, and there were wonderful things to be seen through her cell-window. She saw the dawn, golden-girdled, garbed in flowing rose-color, unlock the eastern portals of the sky. She saw stars and moon glimmer faintly and more faint, and finally sink to rest under the high, clear green of the morning heaven. Last of all, over the feathery line of trees that made a horizon for her at her cell-window, she could see the first dazzling ladder of the sun lifted up to lean against the east. And then Laure would long for the murmur of devotion to be stilled in the Abbey, for sun-mists were filling the Heavens, and from the forest the bird-chorus rose to a full-throated tutti, in its hymn of glorification to the new day.

This morning benediction that she found, Laure kept to herself by day, and carried with her until dark. There was no one in the priory to whom she could have confided her pleasure, for there was none in the Abbey that had her love, or, indeed, any love at all, for the world that God had made for Himself and for mankind. The day-tasks also had their pleasures for the novice. She learned, in time, that she was not obliged to fill her recreation hours with embroidery; but that she might sleep, or pray, or work in the garden, or do whatever a quiet fancy should select. So she chose to befriend the soil, and played with it as if it were a tender companion. And after her exercise here, the rest of the day, nones, vespers, supper, confession, and compline, melted away almost unheeded, leaving her at last to the sweet-breathed night, and to a sleep as dreamless and as sound as that of any baby.

In this most simple way, without any untoward happening, without her once leaving the priory, the days flowed on, spring melted into summer, and Laure found herself possessed of an infinite and ever-increasing content, the great secret of which probably lay in the fact that every waking hour had its occupation. She had entered her new life in the most beautiful time of the year, and, heedless of this, began, in her delusive happiness, to wonder why, long ago, the whole world had not taken to such existence. She had plenty of time to indulge in dreams,—vague and fragile dreams of the great world and the people dwelling therein, that she should never come to know. But the fact that she could never know them did not come home to her with the force of a deprivation. She did not feel herself to be a hopeless prisoner. She was not professed; and the fact that there still remained to her a free choice easily kept her from any over-vivid perception of the eternal dulness of convent life.

Once in two weeks Madame Eleanore came to see her, and if these visits were bitter to the mother, Laure never guessed it. Also, from time to time, the professed nuns would leave the convent for a day or two at a time, on what errands the novices were not told. But Laure knew that similar privileges would be hers after her profession.

The summer, in its fulness and beauty, passed away. Purple autumn came and went. And one day, in the first cold weather, Laure was summoned to the Mother-prioress’ room, where she was told a proud thing. It was that, if she chose profession at the end of her novitiate, which would come in the Christmas season, her consecration might take place at the same time, by special permission from the highest power; for, by ordinary ecclesiastic law, she was still many years too young for this consummation of the celibate life. But if she so chose, his Grace the Bishop of St. Nazaire would perform the ceremony of sanctification on the twenty-sixth of December, directly after the forty-eight-hour vigil of the birth of the Christ.

Laure heard this news with every appearance and every expression of delight; and when she returned to the church for tierce and morning mass, she tried, all through the service, to bring herself face to face with herself, to appreciate, as she was conscious that she must, sooner or later, the intense gravity of her position. But for some reason, by some failure of concentrative force, she could not bring her mind to the point of understanding. Over and over again her thoughts slid around that one fact that she knew she must try to realize,—how, after the giving of her final pledge, there could be no turning back, there could be no escape, while she should live, from this life of prayer. She did not appreciate it at all. She only remembered that she had been very contented here, and that the days were never long.

In the weeks that followed her talk with MÈre Piteuse, Laure enacted this same scene of effort with herself many times, always futilely. As a matter of fact, it was too grave a responsibility to put upon the shoulders of a child in years and a less than child in experience. But this unfairness was one of the prerogatives of monasticism, unappreciated to this day.

Christmas time drew near; and gradually Laure dropped her efforts toward understanding and fell into dreams of a varied and complex, if unimportant, nature. She was to be professed alone, on the day after Christmas. No novice had entered the convent within three months of her, and, moreover, her birth and position made it desirable that she should be surrounded by a little extra pomp; for, although Laure did not know it, she was much looked up to by the nuns of humbler birth, and universally regarded as a future prioress of the house. During the last days of her novitiate the young girl was treated with peculiar reverence and consideration, and she was given a good deal of time for solitary reflection and prayer. Every day she was summoned to the cell of the Prioress, who herself gave the girl good counsel and instruction upon the higher life; while so much general attention was paid her that Laure became a little astonished at her own importance.

In the first three weeks of December Madame Eleanore did not come at all to see her daughter, and Laure grew lonely for her. She suspected nothing of her mother’s heart-sickness over the approaching ceremony that was to cut her child off from her forever; and, indeed, had Laure been told of the mother-feeling, she could not have understood it.

On the afternoon of the twenty-third day of December the novice was kneeling in her cell, supposedly at prayer, in reality indulging in a rather forlorn and melancholy reverie. It was the hour of recreation; and the convent was very quiet, for most of the nuns were sleeping, in preparation for the strain of the forty-eight-hour Christmas service. The stillness brought a chill to Laure’s heart, and she was near to tears, when her door was suddenly pushed open, and some one halted there. Laure turned quickly enough to see the white-robed Prioress disappear, closing the door behind a figure that remained motionless inside the threshold.

“My mother!” cried Laure, springing to her feet.

“Laure,” was the quivering response, as Eleanore held out her arms.

The dreamer, suddenly become a little child, went into the mother-clasp, her pristine home, and was half carried over to the only seat in the room,—a wooden tabouret, large enough for only one. Upon this Eleanore seated herself, while Laure sank to the floor beside her, huddling close to the human warmth of her mother, her head lying in that mother’s lap, both hands held tightly in the larger, stronger, older ones.

“Laure—my Laure—my little Laure!” was all that, at this time, madame could force her lips to say. And hearing it, the girl, suddenly overwrought and overswept with repressed yearning for home love, all at once burst into a convulsive flood of tears.

Some moments passed, and the sobs, instead of diminishing, began to increase in violence, till Eleanore became alarmed. Certain unexpressed fears took possession of her. She made no effort to bring them into definite order in her mind. They merely joined themselves to a shadow that had long since come upon her in the form of a question: What, in bare reality, was this vast monster called “the Church”? Why had it a right to step thus between mother and child? How could such a thing be called holy? Filled with this idea, and realizing to the full how desperately short was her chance, Eleanore set herself to work, through every means known to her, to quiet Laure, to stop her tears, and to gain her earnest attention.

Under madame’s determined calm, it was not long before Laure was brought back to self-control. And when she was quiet, the mother, sitting very straight in her place, drew the girl to her feet, and, holding her fast by the hand, while she looked steadily into the clear, brown eyes, she asked, slowly, with an emphasis born of her desperation,—

“Laure, is it indeed in thy heart to remain, of thy free will and desire, forever in this house, forsaking all that was dear to thee of youth and love, and freedom, in thy home, Le CrÉpuscule?”

Laure, while she looked at her mother, gave a sudden sigh, and her face became staring pale. Eleanore strove to fathom her daughter’s look, but could know nothing of the flood of natural desire and youth that was oversweeping the girl. Laure’s resistance against it was silence. She sat still, cowed and bent, while the noise of the waters filled her ears and her heart was near to bursting with suffocation and yearning. Before this silence, however, these passionate moments gradually ebbed away. The wave retreated, and her heart shut tight. Words and phrases from Holy Scriptures, books of prayer, and St. Benedict’s Rule, came crowding to her, and she considered to herself how she might show her mother the sin of her suggestion. But, as she had kept silence one way, so now she practised it in the other. After the long pause her voice found itself in three words only,—

“My mother!—madame!”

Eleanore’s eyes fell. Her hope was gone. For the thousandth time her religion rose to shame her, before her child, for the absorbing love of her motherhood. Presently Laure, standing before her, more like her judge than like the disconsolate creature she had so lately comforted, spoke again,—

“Madame, here in this place have I found contentment. There is no sorrow and no desire when one lives but to pray and sleep, and wake and pray again. God lives here continually in our hearts and He begets in us the love that we bear for each other. Moreover, after my profession and consecration, much freedom will be added to my life. I shall have no more long hours of instruction, nor shall I be called on to do the bidding of any one save perhaps that of the Reverend Mother. And whereas thou ridest hither to me each fortnight, I, after my vow, may go instead to thee, to see thee and mine ancient home.—Nay, mother, forgive me that I rebuke thy words; but thou must not urge me thus, for my spirit is not as yet very strong or very much tried, and is like to break under temptation.”

Dry-eyed and straight-lipped, Eleanore rose from her place and kissed her daughter, saying,—

“This is farewell, dear child, till thou shalt come home to me for the first time after thy wedding with Heaven. My humble and earthly blessing be upon thee,—and mayst thou find thy spirit strong, my Laure, when thou shalt have need of it; as, in God’s time, thou surely wilt.”

Once again the mother kissed her girl—kissed her in final renunciation. Laure felt a burning upon her brow long after madame had left the room. Eleanore’s last words also somewhat affected the novice,—brought her a dim sense of uneasiness and foreboding. But it was in silence that she saw the black-robed figure leave the cell, and in silence she remained for a long time after she was left alone, thinking over what had passed.

Laure had acted in such perfect sincerity that the wound she inflicted on her mother, and the mortification she put upon her, were neither of them realized. It was not wonderful that the impulses of the girl’s heart had been stilled by the unceasing precept of the past months. Her years were naturally powerless to fathom her mother’s heart, the heart of her who sees herself completely separated in every interest from the one that has always been nearest and dearest. And so the argument that she conducted within herself after her mother’s going was not one of justification of her own act, but—oh, ye gods!—an attempted justification of Eleanore’s impiety.

Laure passed the next two days in an odor of extreme sanctity, and hailed with deep inward joy the beginning of the long vigil of the birth of the Saviour, on Christmas Eve. She was excused from keeping steadily in church through this protracted service, for the reason that she would be obliged, according to the Rule, to spend the night after her consecration alone in the church, at prayer. Throughout Christmas Day Laure was in a state of repressed nervous excitement. Was not to-morrow to be her wedding-day? Was she not to become what the first Magdalen had never been,—the bride of Christ? Her prayers throughout this day were mingled with thoughts of the highest purity, the most refined spiritual ecstasy, the most shining, uplifted innocence. Tears of joy and of proud humility flowed readily from her eyes, while her mouth was filled with heavenly praises that welled up from her heart.

In the afternoon she was sent away to rest; for the Mother-prioress was considerate of her strength. Laure did not, however, lie down. Instead, she stood for more than an hour at the window of her cell, looking out over the world, and watching the fine feathery snowflakes float down through the clear blue air. The earth was wrapped in a mantle whiter than her consecration robe and veil. Perhaps it was a shroud. Laure shivered at the thought, while she contemplated the unutterable stillness of all things. Not a sound disturbed this vast scene of death. The tree-boughs bent low under the weight of their pure burden; and when the early evening fell, and vespers chimed out over the valley, the tiny, frozen tears of Heaven still floated through the dark with ever-increasing softness.

It was seven o’clock when Soeur Celeste, the chaplain, came to summon the bride-elect to confession and interrogation with Monseigneur the Bishop of St. Nazaire. As the two women passed together down the long corridor of novices, through the cold cloister and empty refectory and along the passage leading to the chapter, Laure’s heart was struck with a chill of fear. How terribly empty the convent was! No one in the refectory, the corridors scarcely lighted, the whole convent utterly silent; for the drone of prayers in the church was inaudible here. She wondered how the terrible vigil progressed, how many nuns had fainted in their fatigue. She thought of anything but the matter before her, and was still unprepared when the chaplain left her alone at the door of the chapter.

The Bishop of St. Nazaire was alone in this room, and at Laure’s appearance he rose and went to her, taking her by the hand, and not amazed to find her icy cold.

“My daughter!” he said gently; and Laure, looking into his face, was suddenly filled with an ineffable comfort.

She had known the Bishop all her life, for he was her mother’s close friend and a constant visitor at Le CrÉpuscule. But never before had she seen him in this fulness of his office, so replete with magnetic spirituality. If the unswervingly narrow tenets of his creed made St. Nazaire too arbitrary where his religion was concerned, and if the geniality of his own nature had, at times, brought upon him in his own home reactions that afterwards rendered necessary the severest penances, at least these two extremes of his life had brought him to a remarkable intermediate balance. Irrespective of his state, he could be defined as a man of the world, of large sympathies, having a broad understanding of human frailty, because of the unconquerable weaknesses of his own nature. His ethical code was one of high severity and strict purity; and he strove with all the power of his spirit to follow it himself, never failing, the while, to excuse the eternal failures of others. And now, as Laure looked up into his large, smooth-shaven face, framed in long fair hair, and lighted by a pair of bright blue eyes that generally regarded the world with a surprising air of trustful innocence, the young novice lost all her sense of desolation, and felt herself suddenly introduced into a secure and unhoped-for haven.

St. Nazaire himself, examining the young girl’s face, and searching her soul therein, knew that at this moment he was nearer to the inmost being of the daughter of Le CrÉpuscule than he should ever be again; and he felt that no one ever yet had been in a position to probe the depths of her nature as he was going to probe them now. She gave herself up to him as completely as Eleanore had given her once long ago, when, as a new-born infant, she had wailed in his arms at her baptism before the altar in the chapel of the Twilight Castle.

With this strong feeling of mutual confidence, Laure and the Bishop seated themselves in the chapter of the convent. Confession and stereotyped interrogation were gone through with dutifully, and then followed what Laure had begun to wish for at the first moment of their meeting,—a long and intimate talk upon the life that she should lead as a professed nun. It was a life with which St. Nazaire was as fully conversant as a man could ever be, and he pictured it to Laure as faithfully as he was accustomed to picture Heaven—a heaven of flying men and women carrying in their hands small golden harps—to those that received the last sacrament at his hands. Laure had a vision of long years filled ever fuller of transcendent joy and peace, in which she should never know a wish that her life could not fill, nor a desire beyond more earnest prayers, or a fast a little longer and more rigorous than heretofore. And so skilful was the Bishop in the manipulation of his sombre material, that he got from it remarkable beauties which, impossible as it seems, were as convincing to him as to Laure.

It was late in the evening when the young girl received the episcopal blessing and retired through the still nunnery to her cell. But her mind was at perfect rest that night; and she went to sleep to dream of nothing but the happiness and beauty of a consecrated life.

At ten o’clock on the morning of the twenty-sixth day of December, the whole convent assembled in church for high mass, which was to be celebrated by the Bishop of St. Nazaire. To-day the novices were separated from the professed nuns, and the two companies knelt on opposite sides of the church, leaving a broad space between them. The choir was in its place. In the lower choir-stalls sat the Mother-prioress, the sub-prioress, the chaplain and the deacons; while his Grace was in the great chair of honor used by none but him. The only member of the nunnery not present was Laure, who made her appearance just as the bell began to ring for the opening of the mass. She came in from the chapter-house at the far end of the church, and moved slowly up the aisle. Her white robe and full mantle hid her figure and trailed around her on the floor, and her head was crowned with the bridal veil, which covered her face and fell to the ground all around her. In one hand she carried a parchment scroll on which her vow was inscribed; and in the other hand she bore the wedding ring.

As she advanced toward the altar every head was turned toward her, and it was seen that she was white as death. But she was also very calm. Indeed she was acting quite mechanically, like one under a hypnotic spell; and there was no expression whatever on her face as she made her genuflection to the cross, and then turned aside and knelt among the company of novices. She took her usual part in the mass that followed, making no slip in the service, and joining as usual in the singing, with her full contralto voice.

When the benediction had been pronounced from the chancel, there was a pause. No one in the church moved from her knees, and the Bishop remained before the company with his right hand uplifted. Laure raised her eyes, and her body trembled slightly, for her heart was palpitating like running water. When the silence had lasted a seemingly unbearable while, St. Nazaire turned his face to Laure, who rose and went up to him, kneeling again in the chancel. And now, as she spoke, her quiet, impressive voice was heard by every nun in the church,—

“Suscipe me, Domine, secundum eloquium tuum et vivam. Et non confundas me in expectatione mea.”

As she finished, Laure’s throat contracted, and she gasped convulsively. Her head swam in a mist, but she knew that the Bishop was questioning her from the catechism,—knew that she was answering him; and then, afterwards, she heard, as from a great distance, the voice of the Bishop praying. At the Amen, St. Nazaire signed to her again, and she rose and stepped forward to his side. Then, turning till she faced the church, she said quite distinctly, though in a low tone,—

“I, Sister Angelique, promise steadfastness, virginity, continuance in virtue, and obedience before God and all His saints, in accordance with the Rule of St. Benedict, in this Priory of Holy Madeleine, in the presence of the Reverend Father Charles, Lord Bishop of St. Nazaire, of the Duchy of Brittany, Lord under the most Christian Duke, Jean de Montfort.”

Thereafter she went up to the altar, and there signed her scroll with her new name and the sign of the cross. And there the ring of Heaven was placed upon her finger, and she was declared a bride. For the last time she knelt before the father, who lifted up his hands and consecrated her, after the ancient formula, to the love of her Saviour, the blessing of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost. And then Laure, a professed nun, came down from the holy place, and was received among her sisters and reverently saluted by them.

The ceremony over, all the convent adjourned to the refectory, where a little feast of rejoicing was held in honor of the newly consecrated one. And after this, at an early hour of the afternoon, Laure was conducted to her cell, and her ten days of retirement began. All that afternoon, overcome with the strain of the past few days, the young girl slept. She woke only when the Soeur Eloise, a stout and stupid little nun, but a few weeks since made a lay sister, came up to her with bread and milk. When she had eaten and was alone again, she sat for a long time in her dark cell, looking out upon the starry night, and wondering vaguely over her long future. Presently the bell for the end of confession rang out, and, knowing that it was time, she rose and went through the convent, and into the vast church. The last of the nuns had left it and gone to seek her rest. Only the sub-prioress remained, waiting for Laure. Seeing her come, the older nun saluted her silently, and then moved away toward the dimly lighted chapter. In the doorway of this room she turned to look back at the white figure standing in the dimly lighted, incense-reeking aisle; and then, with a faint sigh of memory, she extinguished all the chapter lights, bowed to the little crucifix hanging in that room, and went her way to bed.

Laure was left alone in the great, dusky House of God. Where she knelt, before the shrine of St. Joseph, two candles burned. All around her was darkness—silence—solitude. Awed and wide-eyed, she forced herself to kneel upon the stones, and her mind vaguely sought a prayer. But thoughts of Heaven refused to come. Her Bridegroom was very far away. She felt a cold weight settling slowly down upon her heart, and she trembled, and her brows grew damp with chilly dew. Many thoughts came and went. She remembered afterwards to have had a very distinct vision of Alixe, standing alone upon a great cliff a mile from Le CrÉpuscule, with a wild sea-wind blowing her hair and her mantle, and white gulls veering about her head. For an instant, a wild longing flamed up through her soul. Setting her lips, she tried to force her mind back again to God. One—two—three faltering, reverent words were uttered by her. Then Laure du CrÉpuscule started wildly to her feet.

“God! Oh, God! I am imprisoned! I am captive! I am captive forever! God! Oh, God!”

As these wild cries echoed through the vaulted roof, she threw herself passionately to the floor and lay there helpless, while the wave of merciless realization swept over her. Then her hands wandered along the stones of the floor, and her cheek followed them, and she clutched at the cold, damp granite, in a vain, vague search for her mother’s breast.