hand, at twenty minutes past seven.

There is a small house with a little chapel attached to it in a road in
Chelsea where some Frenchwomen, who were exiled from their own country,
have come to dwell. It is built on Sir Thomas More's garden, and it
possesses within its boundaries the mulberry tree under which the
chancellor was sitting when they came to fetch him to the Tower. It is a
poor little house with very poor inmates, and a poor little chapel. But
in that chapel night and day, without a moment's break, are to be found
two figures (when there are not more) dressed in plain brown habits and
black veils. And on the altar there is always a crowd of lighted
candles, in spite of the poverty of the chapel. It is a very small
chapel and oddly shaped. The length of the little building is from north
to south, and the altar is to the east. There are but few benches, but
they run the full length of the building. Strange things are known by
these women, who never go farther than the small garden at the back, of
the life of the town about them. Some men and more women get accustomed
to coming daily into the chapel with its unceasing exposition, and to
love its silence and its atmosphere of rest and peace. Some never make
themselves known; others sometimes ask to see a nun, and thus gradually
these recluses come to know memorable secrets in human lives.

Molly had often been there in the weeks which she had afterwards called
"my short fit of religious emotion." She chose to go there to-night, to
spend there her last hour in London.

The little chapel was fairly cool, and through a door very near the
altar, open to the garden, came the scent of mignonette on the air.
Besides the motionless figures at the altar-rail there was no one else
in the chapel.

At eight o'clock two small brown figures came in and knelt bowed down in
the middle of the sanctuary. The two who had finished their watch rose
and knelt by the side of those who relieved guard. Then the four rose
together, and the two newcomers took up their station, and the others
left them. And the incessant oblation of those lives went on. What a
vast moral space lay between their lives and Molly's! What a contrast!

Molly had had no home, but they had given up their homes for this. Molly
had pined in vain for human love; they had turned away from it. Molly
had rebelled against all restraints; they had chosen these bonds. Molly
had sinned, against even the world's code, f