Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/22

 failed to come, and understood the feeling under her friend's silence. The sympathy so deep, though unexpressed, wrung her soul to an outburst that startled the repressed woman before her.

"I have known the truth for a long time," she hurried on, speaking, even in these moments of agitation, with the preciseness of the cloister inmates. "I am afraid I have rebelled against it. I am still young, and my work is not done. Life is sweet and peaceful here. I have you and my girls and my music. Perhaps it is because this illness has come upon me so suddenly that I am unprepared. I do not wish to give you up."

"You will have us all beyond," murmured the other, faintly. It was what the Reverend Mother had always said to the young nuns who were starting on their last journey. She had seen so many—so pathetically many of them—go. Sister George, always calm and self-contained, had been with a number at the end. She recalled what it had been to say the simple, the conventional things to them when there had been none of this terrible pulling at the heart-strings. Now her lips refused to shape the words, not through lack of trust, but because the human feeling of coming loss was too strong.