re, at the peril of your
soul, my daughter?"

I was deeply moved, but I made one more effort.

I told the Reverend Mother that, since the days when I had wished to be
a nun, a great change had come over me. I had become a woman, with all a
woman's passions--the hunger and thirst for love, human love, the love
of the good man who loved me with all his soul and strength. Therefore I
could never be a willing and contented Sister. I should only break the
peace and harmony of their house. And though she were to put me down in
the lowest cell of her convent, my love would follow me there; it would
interrupt my offices, it would clamour through my prayers, and I should
always be unhappy--miserably unhappy.

"Not so unhappy there as you will be if you remain in the world and
carry out your intention," said the Reverend Mother. "Oh believe me, my
child, I know you better than you know yourself. If you marry again, you
will never be able to forget that you have broken your vow. Other women
may forget it--frivolous women--women living in society and devoting
their lives to selfish pleasures. Such women may divorce their husbands,
or be divorced by them, and then marry again, without remembering that
they are living in a state of sin, whatever the civil law may say--open
and wicked and shameless sin. But you will remember it, and it will make
you more unhappy than you have ever been in your life before."

"Worse than that," she continued, after a moment, "it will make your
husband unhappy also. He will see your remorse, and share it, because he
will know he has been the cause. If he is a good man the mere sight of
your grief will torture him. The better man he is the more will he
suffer. If you were a runaway nun he would wish to take you back to your
convent, for though it might tear his heart out to part with you, he
would want to restore your soul. But being a wife who has broken her
marriage vows he will never be able to do anything. An immense and awful
shadow will stand between you and darken every hour of your lives that
is left."

When the Reverend Mother had done I sat motionless and speechless, with
an aching and suffocating heart, staring down on the garden over which
the night was falling.

After a while she patted my cold hand and got up to go, saying she would
call early in the morning to bid me good-bye. Her visit to Ireland would
not last longer than three weeks, and after that she might come back for
me, if