Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/143

 go with me, and keep me alive until we get there. It is a long journey and a wearisome one, I know. But we can leave here on the limited to-day and get there Friday morning. You must leave your patients in other hands. I will pay you well. I have plenty of money. It is all I have got now," she added, recklessly.

The doctor hesitated, then put a question.

"Will they take you after you get there?"

She touched the gold cross which had never left her neck.

"This will make them," she said. "Do you know, I've had a sense from the first that I should need it—a strange foreboding. Fate took me in hand, God knows why, and made me what I am. I could not help it. You will not believe it, but I tried—at first—and through it all I held fast to this one thing. If they hesitate, you must talk to the Superior. Tell her that since this weakness has come upon me, I have had but one thought, one wish, day and night—to get home—to get home! Tell her I long for the peace and rest of the convent and—for the goodness of the Sisters. Tell her I want to repent, I want to confess, I want"—she burst suddenly into a paroxysm of hysterical weeping—"I want to wipe out these horrible years before I go."

"I will tell her," said the doctor, quietly.