"The nun who was here to-day is called Sister Dolorosa. Her real name was Pauline Cambron."
The fire died away. The old man left the room on some pretext and did not return. The story that followed was told with many details not given here—traced up from parentage and childhood with that fine tracery of the feminine mind which is like intricate embroidery, and which leaves the finished story wrought out on the mind like a complete design, with every point fastened to the sympathies.
As soon as she had finished he rose quickly from a desire to be alone. So well had the story been knit to his mind that he felt it an irritation, a binding pain. He was bidding her good-night when she caught his hand. Something in his mere temperament drew women towards him.
"Are you married?" she asked, looking into his eyes in the way with which those who are married sometimes exchange confidences.
He looked quickly away, and his face flushed a little fiercely.
"I am not married," he replied, withdrawing his hand.
She threw it from her with a gesture of mock, pleased impatience; and when he had left the room, she sat for a while over the ashes.
"If she were not a nun"—then she laughed and made her difficult way to her bed. But in the room above he sat down to think.
Was this, then, not romance, but life in his own State? Vaguely he had always known that farther south in Kentucky a different element of population had settled, and extended into the New World that mighty cord of ecclesiastical influence which of old had braided every European civilization into an iron tissue of faith. But this knowledge had never touched his imagination. In his own land there were no rural Catholic churches, much less convents, and even among the Catholic congregations of the neighboring towns he had not many acquaintances and fewer friends.
To descend as a gay bird of passage, therefore, upon these secluded, sombre fields, and find himself in the neighborhood of a powerful Order—to learn that a girl, beautiful, accomplished, of wealth and high social position, had of her own choice buried herself for life within its bosom—gave him a startling insight into Kentucky history as it was forming in his own time. Moreover—and this touched him especially—it gave him a deeper insight into the possibilities of woman's nature; for a certain narrowness of view regarding the true mission of woman in the world belonged to him as a result of education. In the conservative Kentucky society by which he had been largely moulded the opinion prevailed that woman fulfilled her destiny when she married well and adorned a home. All beauty, all accomplishments, all virtues and graces, were but means for attaining this end.