Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/198

 sacred an occasion, taken a time like this to wander? She called herself sternly before the tribunal of the conscience she had thought so keenly alive.

It was the sobbing of that woman which had done it. Others were weeping, too, but those sobs were from the heart—the expression of love and agony. Some one among her companions was loved like that! She herself had never known love—a mother's, a sister's. No, nor man's for the chosen woman. So she had not to renounce such devotion as her associates were sacrificing in the last act of their worldly lives. That reflection had led to others. No one grieved for her. What she had, she gave. Money, position, liberty—she cheerfully renounced all these. Could she have offered, had she possessed it, great, unselfish, human affection? What was she renouncing except things for which she did not care? Simply turning her back on a life which failed to give her that for which her hungry heart had passionately longed, still longed!

She felt herself trembling. If she had done only this, she had not realized it before; she herself had been deceived. Had she turned from the world to the cloister merely because here there was peace and relief from the unrest of life beyond its walls? Those outside