so noble in his eyes as when she took that implied
rebuke of his, with meek bending of her proud head, and candid
self-condemnation in the eyes that were lowered and then raised to his,
and beautiful humility in her speech:

"Sir, your reproach is just; it is I who have been lacking in faith.
And--it shall be as you advise."

The distant bugle blared out its warning. The bell tolled twice, stopped,
and tolled four; the smaller bells echoed. The voices of the sentries came
to their ears, loudly at first, then more distant, then reduced to the
merest spider-thread of sound:

"'Ware big gun! South quarter, 'ware!"

"I must go to her," the Mother-Superior said, and passed him swiftly and
went down the ladder. Saxham followed. The white figure on the stool had
not stirred, apparently. Its blank eyes still stared at the wall, and the
mechanical hand moved, sewing at nothing, as diligently as ever.

"Lynette!"

The fixed, blindly-staring eyes came to life. Colour throbbed back into
the wan ivory cheeks. The mouth lost its vacant droop. She rose up from
the stool with a joyful cry, and, stumbling in her haste, ran into the
outstretched arms. As they wrapped about her, clinging to her sole earthly
friend and guardian as though she could never let go, came the crash of
the driving-charge, the yelling Brocken-hunt of the passage of the huge
projectile, the ear-splitting din of the shellburst. She lifted up a
radiant face of laughing defiance, and then choked and quivered and burst
out crying, leaning her panting young bosom against the black habit, and
weeping as though her whole being must dissolve, Undine-like, in tears.

Ah, the lovely feminine woman who weeps and clings! She will never lose
her dominion over the sons of men. The appealing glances of her beautiful
wet eyes melt the stoniest male hearts, the soft tendril-like wreathing of
her arms about the pillar of salt upon the Plain would have had power to
change it back into a breathing human being once more, if Lot had looked
back, instead of his helpmeet. Her sterner sisters may feel as keenly,
love as tenderly, sorrow even more bitterly than she. Who will believe it
among the sons of dead old Adam, who first felt the heaving bosom pant
against his own, and saw the first bright tear-showers fall--forerunners
of what oceans of world-sorrow to be shed hereafter, when the Angel of the
flaming sword drove the peccant pair from Paradise. Ah, the fair, weak
woman who we