ike other
beads, through her rosary.

It was when the final word of the service had been intoned, the last
peal of the exit march had died away, that she looked up meekly, to
encounter a pair of youthful brown eyes gazing pityingly upon her.
That was all she remembered for a moment, that the eyes were youthful
and handsome and tender. Later, she saw that they were placed in a
rather beautiful boyish face, surmounted by waves of brown hair,
curling and soft, and that the head was set on a pair of shoulders
decked in military uniform. Then the brown eyes marched away with the
rest of the rear guard, and the white-bonneted sisters filed out the
side door, through the narrow court, back into the brown convent.

That night Sister Josepha tossed more than usual on her hard bed, and
clasped her fingers often in prayer to quell the wickedness in her
heart. Turn where she would, pray as she might, there was ever a pair
of tender, pitying brown eyes, haunting her persistently. The squeaky
organ at vespers intoned the clank of military accoutrements to her
ears, the white bonnets of the sisters about her faded into mists of
curling brown hair. Briefly, Sister Josepha was in love.

The days went on pretty much as before, save for the one little heart
that beat rebelliously now and then, though it tried so hard to be
submissive. There was the morning work in the refectory, the stupid
little girls to teach sewing, and the insatiable lamps that were so
greedy for oil. And always the tender, boyish brown eyes, that looked
so sorrowfully at the fragile, beautiful little sister, haunting,
following, pleading.

Perchance, had Sister Josepha been in the world, the eyes would have
been an incident. But in this home of self-repression and
retrospection, it was a life-story. The eyes had gone their way,
doubtless forgetting the little sister they pitied; but the little
sister?

The days glided into weeks, the weeks into months. Thoughts of escape
had come to Sister Josepha, to flee into the world, to merge in the
great city where recognition was impossible, and, working her way like
the rest of humanity, perchance encounter the eyes again.

It was all planned and ready. She would wait until some morning when
the little band of black-robed sisters wended their way to mass at the
Cathedral. When it was time to file out the side-door into the
courtway, she would linger at prayers, then slip out another door, and
unseen glide