that he is dead, I should refuse to be reconciled to his
memory."

Graham was confounded by her vehemence. What argument had he
to oppose to this torrent of bitter words? Or how reason with
such a woman as this--one with a show of right, too, on her
side, as he was bound to own? He did not attempt it, but gave
up the point at once, turning to a more practical
consideration.

"If you are not disposed to take charge of your little niece,
Madame," he said, "can you at least suggest any one in whose
care she can be left? I promised her father to place her in
your hands, but you must see it is impossible for me to take
any further responsibility on myself. Even if I had the will,
I have not at present the power."

"I never said I would not take charge of my niece, Monsieur,"
said the Superior.

And to what end then, wonders Graham, this grand tirade, this
fine display of what to him could not but appear very like
hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness? To what end indeed?
And yet, perhaps, not wholly unnatural. After five-and-twenty
years of convent life, Therese Linders still clung to the
memory of the closing scenes of her worldly career, as the
most eventful in the dead level of a grey monotonous life,
still held to the remembrance of her mother's death, and of
her fierce quarrel with her brother, as the period when all
her keenest emotions had been most actively called into play.
And indeed what memories are so precious to us, which, in our
profound egotism, do we cherish so closely, as those of the
times which stirred our strongest passions to their depth, and
which, gathering up, as it were, all lesser experiences into
one supreme moment, revealed to us the intensest life of which
we are capable? There are women who would willingly barter
months of placid existence for one such moment, though it be a
bitter one; and though Mademoiselle Linders was not one of
these, or she would never have discovered that her vocation
lay within the walls of a convent, she was, nevertheless, a
woman capable of strong feelings, of vehement passions; and
these had, perhaps, found their widest scope in the love,
though it had been a wayward one, that she had felt for her
mother, and in her intense jealousy of her brother. For a
quarter of a century these passions had lain dormant, crushed
beneath the slow routine of daily duties; but these, in their
unvarying monotony, had, on the other hand, made that lapse of
years appear bu