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72 Only twice a week did she emerge from the convent walls; once to call on her father, whose linen she took away to mend, and once to pay a visit to her aged relatives. For months she never varied the monotonous tenour of her life, but trusted that in the course of time she would get some pupils and be able to reconcile the nuns to such an unusual proceeding. In the meantime she tried to fit herself more thoroughly for this task. Her friends in Amiens entreated her in vain to come and make her home with them. They had advanced her a little sum, sufficient to enable her to move at all, and she was delighted to owe this to their friendship. But, imperceptibly, her confidences to Sophie and Henriette had grown less expansive. She, who had been wont to descant so freely on everybody and everything, was grown somewhat reticent, and Sophie felt and fretted under the change, in spite of Manon's assurances of her unaltered feelings.

Her tongue was tied in regard to Roland. She intuitively felt that his proud nature would resent her enlarging too freely on him in her letters. She was in honour bound to keep the secret of his offer and rejection. For months now he had made no further advances, though he knew of her retirement to the convent, and continued writing to her. A very ardent lover, guessing, one would imagine, that the lady he wished to marry had left her father's house on his account, would, without a moment's hesitation, have presented himself at the convent gates, and, similar to the knight in the ancient ballad, have lustily knocked thereat till his love had perforce come out to him. Not so M. Roland. No doubt he would have considered it undignified to do anything in a hurry, or from an impulse of passion. He had waited four years before