Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/121

 forgives him, and she comes back to die with him at the end, with the final, maternal cry of her big, loving heart.

The last strain shuddered into silence. The storm, which had seemed tamed to a listening silence, awoke and howled with greater fury. It was almost night. Across the darkening waste of snow that lay in the garden beneath lights appeared, twinkling in the windows of distant wings of the old convent. Madame Holstein walked to the corner where the nun sat, and stood smilingly looking down upon her. Instinctive courtesy roused the Sister from her trance, and she, too, rose, looking at the other woman with eyes that said what her tongue could not speak. Ernestine still slumbered in shameless peacefulness in her corner, her rosy cheek resting against the unsympathetic polished floor. Her mother went to her, bent down and lifted her in her arms. The child was a perceptible burden, but she bore it as lightly and as firmly as a sheet of music when she sang.

"I am afraid my fat baby has lost a little