"Nor I!"
Her words were not spoken. They were not uttered within. As unexpectedly and silently as in the remotest profound of the heavens at midnight some palest little star is loosened from its orbit, shoots a brief span, and disappears, this confession of hers traced its course across the depths of her secret consciousness; but, having made it to herself, she kept her eyes veiled, and did not look at him again that day.
"I think you have now seen everything that could be of any interest," the aged Sister said doubtfully, when they stood in the yard below.
"The place is very interesting to me," he answered, looking around that he might discover some way of prolonging his visit.
"The graveyard, Sister. We might go there." The barely audible words were Sister Dolorosa's. The scene of the temptation was to be transferred for the third time.
They walked some distance down a sloping hillside, and stepped softly within the sacred enclosure. A graveyard of nuns! O Mother Earth, all-bearing, passion-hearted mother! Thou that sendest love one for another into thy children, from the least to the greatest, as thou givest them life! Thou that livest by their loves and their myriad plightings of troth and myriad marriages! With what inconsolable sorrow must thou receive back upon thy bosom, the chaste dust of lorn virgins, whose bosoms thou didst mould for a lover's arms and a babe's slumbers! As marble vestals of the ancient world, buried and lost, they lie, chiselled into a fixed attitude of prayer through the silent centuries.
The aspect and spirit of the place: the simple graves placed side by side like those of the nameless poor, or of soldiers fallen in an unfriendly land: the rude wooden cross at the head of each, bearing the sacred name of her who was dust below; the once chirruping nests of birds here and there in the grass above the songless lips; the sad desolation of this unfinished end—all were the last thing needed to wring the heart of Helm with dumb pity and an ungovernable anguish of rebellion. This, then, was to be her portion. His whole nature cried aloud against it. His ideas of human life, civilisation, his age, his country, his State, rose up in protest. He did not heed the words of the Sister beside him. His thoughts were with Sister Dolorosa, who followed with Ezra in a silence which she had but once broken since her last words to him. He could have caught her up and escaped back with her into the liberty of life, into the happiness of the world.
Unable to endure the place longer, he himself led the way out. At the gate the Sister fell behind with Ezra.
"He seems deeply impressed by his visit," she said in an undertone, "and should bear with him a good account of the convent. Note what he says, Ezra. The order wants friends in Kentucky, where it was born and has flourished;" and looking at Sister Dolorosa and Helm, who were a short distance in front, she added to herself—
"In her, more than in any other one of us, he will behold the perfect spiritual type of the convent. By her he will be made to feel the power of the order to consecrate women, in America, in Kentucky, to the service of the everlasting Church."