Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/38

 draught her friend hastened to give her. Then she lay quiet for a long time, and finally seemed to fall asleep.

Sister George was not obliged to decide the difficult question that lay in this last request. Three days later, when Professor Varick was giving his next lesson, she sat in her place with a stricken face that awed even the liveliest members of her class and carried consternation to the hearts of the more emotional pupils.

"Sister Edgar is worse, I know she is," wrote May Iverson in a pencilled note to a friend near her. "If she were not, Sister George would never look like that."

The message went the length of the great hall, carrying in its wake a settled gloom of which only Professor Varick remained unconscious. He was in an unusually light-hearted mood. Half a dozen times the nun who sat looking at him and thinking of her friend dying without her in the distant infirmary, saw on his lips the brilliant smile Sister Edgar had mentioned during their last long talk together.

May Iverson was going half-heartedly through a recitation, when the slow tolling of the convent bell filled the hall. It was the ominous bell whose deep notes spoke of the passing of another soul. Sister George started to her feet as if the sound had been a blow, and