ctures, saying, "There!
There!"

What she had read was as follows:

"A tragedy has just disturbed our quiet provincial town. Two young girls
of good society fell in love with the same young man; one was
twenty-five, the other nineteen. There was an explanation between the
two sisters: the elder did not wish to stand in the way of the happiness
of the younger; she went away for good, telling her friends that she
intended to enter a convent, and would never return. This is where the
affair took a dramatic turn. The young man loved the girl who had gone
away; he only waited for her return to declare himself. When he heard of
the step she had taken, he applied to the authorities to be exchanged
into another regiment, and went off without informing any one. This
morning the younger of the two sisters was found dead in her room,
killed by a pistol-shot. On the table was a short note:

"'DEAR SISTER,--

"'Where are you? Forgive me! I could not, I ought not, I dared not
live any longer.

"'NINA.'"

"No! It is impossible! It is false! I am delirious!" exclaimed poor
Helene, crushing the paper in her clenched hand. She went near the
window in order to read again the fatal lines. They were indeed there;
they did not disappear! Nothing took their place. They turned from black
to red; they blazed like fire; they burned her heart!

"DEAR SISTER,--

"Where are you? Forgive me! I could not, I ought not, I dared not
live any longer.

"NINA."

Helene seized her black head-dress and bursting into wild laughter
rushed towards the door. She herself had fastened it, but she imagined
that some one was holding it from without, and shook it, sobbing and
laughing at the same time. Then without hesitation she turned the key,
went out, passed Olia who, pale as a sheet, gazed at her without
comprehension and ran down the stairs uttering unintelligible sounds.

A moment after she was hammering at the closed door of the church and
uttering maledictions to the great alarm of Sister Seraphine, who ran to
tell the abbess, making the sign of the cross and crying, "Saints
preserve us! It was not for nothing that the wind last night blew so
fiercely against the windows. It is a real sin of these young ones."

At the sound of Helene's wild cries the other nuns, frightened and
half-dressed, left their cells and ran in the raw cold of the morning to
help their unhappy sister.

Alas! she had misundersto