Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/27

 To them, however, he was a new type, which they studied with interest and on which they had even commented to one another on several occasions. The grace and ease of manner of this man of the world appealed to the dignified nuns; his magnetism and good looks influenced them also, although perhaps they did not realize this.

Of late neither had spoken of him, Sister George remaining silent from the sense that she had exhausted the possibilities of the subject in those early talks, and Sister Edgar following her example because her interest had become deeper than she cared to express. To the dying woman the magnificent strength of the man had appealed from the first with a force not to be understood except by those who stand on the brink of their graves and watch the vigorous pass before them.

"How well he is," she had thought the first time the athletic figure of the professor had faced his class on the rostrum. The idea and the reflections to which it gave rise banished temporarily another thought of a haunting resemblance which had presented itself so vaguely as to have at first no definite place in her consciousness. By some strange association of ideas she recalled the time, "out in the world" and many years ago, when her brother,