grave, where the Mother-Superior lay in her snow-white
coffin, fully habited and mantled, her Rosary in the marble hand on which
the plain gold ring of her Divine espousals shone, the parchment formula
of the vows she took when admitted to her Order nineteen years before,
lying under those meekly-folded hands upon her breast. So she had lain,
feet to the altar, in the Convent chapel that her daughters in Religion
had draped and decked for her, keeping their loving vigils about her from
twilight to dawn, from dawn to twilight, until this hour when they must
yield all that was mortal of her to Earth's guardianship and the
unsleeping watchfulness of God.

Suffocatingly dense the throng about this grave, and strangely quiet. The
women's faces white and haggard and tearless, the men's drawn and deeply
lined. Not even muffled groans or sighs of pity broke the profound silence
as the solemn rite drew to its singularly simple and impressive close. As
the fragrant incense rose from the censer and the holy water sprinkled the
snow-white pall that bore the Red Cross, one dreadful word lurked sinister
in every thought:

Murdered!...

Their friend, helper, nurse, consoler, the woman whose hands had staunched
the bleeding wounds of many present, whose arm had lifted and pillowed the
dying heads of others dear to them; who had stood through long nights of
fever and delirium beside their Hospital pallets, ministering as a very
Angel from Heaven to tortured bodies and suffering souls--murdered!

The tender Mother, the wise virgin, who watched continually with her lamp
prepared, that at the first summons of the Heavenly Bridegroom she might
enter with Him into the marriage chamber, could it be that His signal had
come to her by the bloodstained hand of an assassin? It was so. And--ah!
the horror of it!

The aged priest sobbed as, followed by the server, he moved round the
grave within the enclosing wall of kneeling Sisters. But no answering sob
came from the vast assemblage. They were as dumb--stricken to stone. They
could not yet contemplate the felicity of the pure soul of the martyred
saint, carried by God's Angels into the Land of the ever-living, admitted
to the unspeakable reward of the Beatific Vision. They could only realise
that somebody had killed her.

But when the solemn strophes of the Litany for the Dead broke in upon a
profound silence, the responses of the multitude surged upwards like giant
billows shattering their