Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/182

 innocent and inexperienced when she went back to the world from her class-rooms, but these qualities had not protected her from the loss of many illusions. Her companions had taken delight in destroying them. Repeated plunges into the whirlpool had been their method of combating her determination to return to the convent for which she had a longing—strange and inexplicable even to herself—a sort of Heimweh.

When she left the institution she had not been conscious of the breaking of any very close ties. Her strange reserve had not permitted her to form them. But memory's brush laid warm colors on the days that, in passing, had seemed gray enough. Her earliest memories were not of a mother's care, but of that of the nuns in whose charge she had been placed. Even her vacations had been spent with them, by her own choice. Her little world was the world in which they lived. The quiet garden was her fairyland. The dim corridors had been peopled with the creations of her childhood fancies as she played in them on rainy days. In the chapel she had made her first confession, her heart beating so loudly that she fancied the priest and the silent nun in the pew nearest the confessional might hear it and wonder. There, too, she had been