impressed upon her. Her thoughts went
back to the Reverend Mother, and Evelyn thought of her as of some woman
who had come to some terrible crisis in her worldly life--some crisis
violent as the crisis that had come in her own life. The Reverend Mother
must have perceived, just as she had done, as all must do sooner or
later, that life out of the shelter of religion becomes a sort of
nightmare, an intolerable torture. Then she wondered if the Reverend
Mother were a widow--that appeared to her likely. One who had suffered
some great disaster--that too seemed to her likely. She had been an
ambitious woman. Was she not so still? Is a passion ever obliterated? Is
it not rather transformed? If she had been personally ambitious, she was
now ambitious only for her convent: her passion had taken another
direction. And applying the same reasoning to herself, she seemed to see
a future for herself in which her love passions would become transformed
and find their complete expressions in the love of God.

The Reverend Mother again addressed her, and Evelyn considered what age
she might be. Between sixty and seventy in point of years, but she
seemed so full of intelligence, wisdom and sweetness that she did not
suggest age; one did not think of her as an old woman. Her slight figure
still retained its grace, and though a small woman, she suggested a tall
one; and the moment she spoke there was the voice which drew you like
silk and entangled you as in a soft winding web. Evelyn smiled a little
as she listened, for she was thinking how the Reverend Mother as a young
woman must have swayed men. Presumably at one time it had pleased her to
sway men's passion, or at least it pleased Evelyn's imagination to think
it had. Not that she thought the Reverend Mother had ever been anything
but a good woman, but she had been a woman of the world, and Evelyn
attributed no sin to that. Even the world is not wholly bad; the
Reverend Mother and Monsignor owed their personal magnetism to the
world. Without the world they would have been like Father Daly and
Mother Philippa--holy simplicities. She looked at the quiet nun, and her
simple good nature touched her. Evelyn went toward her. Sister Mary John
broke into the conversation so often that the Reverend Mother had once
to check her.

"Sister Mary John, we hope that Miss Innes will sing to-morrow and every
day while she is with us. But she must do as she likes, and these
musical questions are not