The Sisters, in their first terror, caught at each other instinctively, or grasped the woodwork with convulsed hands. One or two novices had screamed outright, but the most of them uttered an ejaculatory prayer, more than half unconscious. The Mother Superior was standing upright and motionless in her place.
'Is any one hurt?' she asked steadily, and looking round the semicircle in the gloom.
No answer came to her question.
'If any one of you was struck by anything,' she said again, 'let her speak.'
No one had been hurt, for the small choir was under the apse of the chapel and there were no windows there.
'Let us go to the hospital at once,' she said. 'The patients will need us.'
Her calm imposed itself upon the young novices and one or two of the more nervous Sisters; the others were brave women and had only been badly startled and shaken, for which no one could blame them. They filed out, two and two, by the side door of the choir, Mother Veronica coming last. From the cloister they could see that the big glass door of the reception-hall was smashed, and that the windows overhead on that side were also broken. Singularly enough, not one of those on the other side was injured.
All had felt the certainty that a dynamite bomb had been exploded somewhere in the building with the intention of blowing up the hospital. As they fell out of their ranks and scattered in twos and threes, hastening to the different parts of the establishment where each did her accustomed work, Sister Giovanna naturally found herself beside the Mother Superior. As one of the supervising nurses, she was, of course, needed in the hospital itself with her superior.
'What do you think it was, Mother?' she asked in a low tone.
'Nothing but dynamite could have done such damage——'