gnor. "Now, wasn't it extraordinary,
Mother, that I should have written like that about Sister Bridget,
and to-day you should tell me that the lay sisters complained about
me? If the complaint had been that I was inclined to put the active
above the contemplative orders and was dissatisfied with our life
here--"

"Dissatisfied!" the Prioress said.

"Only this, Mother: I have been reading the story of the Order of the
Little Sisters of the Poor, and it seems to me so wonderful that
everything else, for the moment, seems insignificant."

The Reverend Mother smiled.

"Your enthusiasms, my dear Evelyn, are delightful. The last book you
read, the last person you meet--"

"Do you think I am so frivolous, so changeable as that, dear Mother?"

"Not changeable, Evelyn, but spontaneous."

"It would seem to me that everything in me is of slow growth--but why
talk of me when there is Jeanne to talk about; marvellous,
extraordinary, unique--" Evelyn was nearly saying "divine Jeanne,"
but she stopped herself in time and substituted the word "saintly."
"No one seems to me more real than this woman, no one in literature;
not Hamlet, nor Don Quixote, not Dante himself starts out into
clearer outline than this poor servant-girl--a goatherd in her
childhood." And to the Prioress, who did not know the story of this
poor woman, Evelyn told it, laying stress--as she naturally would--
on Jeanne's refusal to marry a young sailor, whom she had been
willing to marry at first, but whom she refused to marry on his
returning after a long voyage. When he asked her for whom she had
refused him, she answered for nobody, only she did not wish to marry,
though she knew of no reason why she should not. It was not caprice
but an instinct which caused Jeanne to leave her sweetheart, and to
go on working in humble service attending on a priest until he died,
then going to live with his sister, remaining with her until she
died, and saving during all these long twenty years only
four-and-twenty pounds--all the money she had when she returned to the
little seaport town whence she had come: a little seaport town where
the aged poor starved in the streets, or in garrets in filth and
vermin, without hope of relief from any one.

It was to this cruel little village, of which there are many along
the French coast, and along every coast in the world, that Jeanne
returned to rent a garret with an old and bedridden woman, unable to
help herself. Without th