Why had the Mother shunned her? She knew that she had. Why had she felt,
even with the glamour of _his_ presence about her, and the music of his
voice in her ears, that all was not well?

Why, even with the lifting of her burden, in the unutterable relief of
hearing, from the lips that had been her law, that her dreadful secret
need never be revealed, had she felt consternation and alarm? The words
were written in fiery letters, on the murky dark of the bombproof, where
the tiny lamp that had hung before the Tabernacle on the altar of the
Convent chapel now burned, a twinkling red star, before the silver
Crucifix that hung upon the east wall.

"He is not to be told. I command you never to tell him!"

The doubt germinated and presently pushed through a little spear. Had
those lips given right counsel or wrong? Ought he to be told? Was it
dishonest, was it traitorous, to hide the truth? And yet, what are the
lives of even the upright, and clean, and continent among men, compared
with the life of a girl bred as she had been? The sin had not been hers.
She, the victim, was blameless. And yet, and yet ...

To this girl, who had learned to see the Face of Christ and of His Mother
reflected in one human face that had smiled down upon her, waking in the
little white bed in the Convent infirmary from the long, recuperating
sleep that turns the tide of brain-fever, the thought that a shadow of
deceit could mar its earnest, candid purity was torture. Months back they
had said to her--the lips that had given her the first kiss she had
received since a dying woman's cold mouth touched the sleeping face of a
yellow-haired baby held to her in a strong man's shaking hands, as the
trek-waggon rolled and rumbled over the veld:

"The man who may one day be your husband will have the right to know."

It was a different voice to the one that had commanded, "You are never to
tell him!" Lynette lay listening to those two voices until the alarm-clock
belled and the Sisters rose at midnight for matins. Then she lay listening
to the soft murmur of voices in the dark, as the red lamp glimmered before
the silver Christ upon the wall. The nuns needed no light, knowing the
office by heart:

"_Delicta quis intelligit? ab occultis meis munda me, et ab alienis parce
servo tuo_"--"Who can comprehend what sin is? Cleanse me from my hidden
sins, and from those of others save Thy servant."

The antiphon followed the _Gloria_, and then the soft woman