forth
her old manner of authority. Sitting alone with Doris before the fire in
the living room the evening of Meredith's funeral and Father Noble's
departure she grew stern and commanding.

"This will never do, my dear," she said. "It cannot be that life has
made of you a cruel, unjust woman."

Doris dropped her eyes--they were wonderful eyes, her real and only
claim to beauty. Dusky eyes they were, with a light in them of amber.

"How much did Merry tell you?" she asked, faintly, for the older woman
looked so frail and pure that it seemed impossible that she knew the
worst.

"My dear, she told me--nothing. Her letter said that she wanted to tell
me things--things that she could not tell to God"--Angela unconsciously
touched her cross--"but there was no time. No time."

"There are things that women cannot tell to God, Sister. Things that
they can only tell to some women!"

A bitterness that she could not control shook Doris's voice. She shrank
from touching the exquisite detachment of Sister Angela by the truth,
and yet she must have as much sympathy as possible and, certainly,
cooeperation.

"Sister, this child should never have been born!"

The words reached where former words had failed. A flush touched
Angela's white face--it was like sunrise on snow. Then, after a pause:

"Did--Meredith--think that?" A growing sternness gave Doris hope that
she might be saved the details that were like poison in her blood.

"Yes. Protected by--by what is law--George Thornton----"

But Angela raised her thin, transparent hand commandingly. It was as if
she were staying the torrents of wrong and shame that threatened to
deluge all that she had gained by her life of renunciation and
repression--and yet in her clear eyes there gleamed the understanding of
the depths.

"May God have mercy upon--the child!" was what she said, and by those
words she took her stand between past wrong and hope of future justice.
"You must take this child, Doris," she said. "All that you know and feel
but make the course imperative and inevitable."

"Sister, how can I--feeling as I do?"

"Can you afford not to? Can you leave it--to such a man?"

"But, Sister, you do not know him. If I should conquer my aversion and
take the child, if I succeeded in loving it--he would bide his time and
claim it. The law that made this horrible thing possible covers his
claim to the child."

Angela drooped back in her chair. She looked old and beaten.