Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/96

 Sister Chrysostom had been sitting in her chair in a limp heap, as if something that held her up had given way, but she rose when her sister said that about the lark.

"We must go," she said, and her voice sounded as if she were speaking in her sleep, and her eyes looked that way, too. The blond girl laughed again. She had the most unpleasant laugh I ever heard, but she used it often enough.

"Well, that's what I was going to say," she said. "This is all very nice for you people, of course, but I'll get my cue in a minute—"

Sister Chrysostom turned her eyes towards her and yet looked as if she didn't see her. You've seen that expression; it isn't pleasant. Then she spoke, and there was something in her voice that made her sister turn and look squarely at her for the first time.

"Clara," she said, "you have broken my heart and I am glad of it. It is a fitting punishment for the thing I have done—the only punishment I could have felt. If you had received me in the spirit in which I came to you, if you had returned the love I have given you all these years, I should have gone back to the convent exulting. It is true that I left you for the convent; perhaps I did wrong. But you have punished me now for that and for this,