Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/194

 voice of nature, wailing for those who were to adjure its weakness.

The chapel was full of the stifled sobs of those who watched the scene. The novices were dead—buried beneath that sombre pall, to rise inhabitants of another world. Sister Patience closed her eyes, and the thought came again and again. It ate into her brain. The music seemed to stop. She no longer felt the warmth of the bodies lying near her. Her face rested against the cold chapel floor, and on the background of the scene through which she was passing memory suddenly brought up her past life, like vivid pictures thrown on a screen.

She saw a little child, in a black frock, timidly entering a dimly lighted room. There was something long and black there, and at the head and foot of it wax candles were burning.

The child stood on tip-toe and looked at a sleeping face.

"It is your mother, dear," a voice said. "Kiss her good-bye." The child kissed her, and for years memory never recalled her loss without a sense of the irresponsive, icy lips on which her own had rested.

Then the child stood by an open grave into which a box was being lowered. It was a gray winter day, and falling snowflakes floated