“All?” she said, with a rather puzzled look in the frosty blue eyes. “I would it had been a larger sum, Father; for the convent’s sake, of course.”
“And am I to hear no word of regret, Sister, for the man to whom you were all the world?”
This was, of course, a most shocking speech, considering the speaker and the person whom he addressed; but it came warm from that inconvenient heart which had no business to be beneath the Prior’s cassock. Mother Margaret was scandalised, and she showed it in her face, which awoke her companion to the fact that he was not speaking in character. That a professed nun should be expected to feel personal and unspiritual interest in an extern! and, as if that were not enough, in a man! Mother Margaret’s sense of decorum was quite outraged.
“How could such thoughts trouble the blessed peace of a holy sister?” she wished to know. “Pardon me, Father; I shall pray for his soul, of course. What could I do more?”
And the Prior recognised at last that to the one treasure of that dead man’s heart, the news he brought was less than it had been to him.
He bit his lips severely. It was all he could do to keep from telling her that the pure, meek, self-abnegating soul which had passed from earth demanded far fewer prayers than the cold, hard, selfish spirit which dwelt within her own black habit.
“It is I who require pardon, Sister,” he said, in a constrained voice. “May our Lord in His mercy forgive us all!”
He made no further attempt to converse with Mother Margaret. But, as he passed her a few minutes later, he heard that she and Sister Regina had gone back to the previous subject, which they were discussing with some interest in their tones.
“O woman, woman!” groaned the Prior, in his heart; “the patch on Sister Maud’s elbow is more to thee than all the love thou hast lost. Ah, my dear Lord! it is not you that I mourn. You are far better hence.”
From which speech it will be seen that the Bonus Homo was very far from being a perfect monk.