Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/110

 in the leather case that was her greatest treasure. Some of the photographs, taken in various operatic rôles, made the nun turn away with a troubled look in her eyes. These costumes, this acting—surely, they could not be right. Yet that voice—that marvellous voice which God had given the woman—the world must be the better for that. Oh, if she herself could hear it! If once, just once before she died, she could hear a great voice developed to its highest possibilities. For years the longing had been with her. Now it grew and strengthened by this thought-association with the woman who had become the personification of the ideal in her life—still as remote, alas! as if that ideal had never taken form.

Her heart felt heavy at the thought, and her smooth brow clouded. Ernestine, who was chattering at her side on the subject dearest to her, laid her cheek suddenly against the Sister's hand.

"Ach, but I wish you could hear my mother sing," she said. "I wish—I wish it more than anything."

The outspoken expression of the longing in her own heart, the touch of the little cheek—perhaps, too, the strain of many rehearsals of a holiday musical programme—had a singular effect on the nun. She tried to speak and