"The least reparation I can make for my offence is to tell you that in offering me your love you offer me the cup of sacred humiliation, and that I thank you for reminding me of my duty, while I drain it to the dregs.
"After long deliberation I have written to tell you this; and if it be allowed me to make one request, I would entreat that you will never lay this sin of mine to the charge of my religion and my order.
"We shall never meet again. Although I may not listen to your proposal, it is allowed me to love you as one of the works of God. And since there are exalted women in the world who do not consecrate themselves to the church, I shall pray that you may find one of these to walk by your side through life. I shall pray that she may be worthy of you; and perhaps you will teach her sometimes to pray for one who will always need her prayers.
"I only know that God orders our lives according to His goodness. My feet He set in one path of duty, yours in another, and He had separated us for ever long before He allowed us to meet. If, therefore, having thus separated us, He yet brought us together only that we should thus know each other and then be parted, I cannot believe that there was not in it some needed lesson for us both. At least, if He will deign to hear the ceaseless, fervent petition of one so erring, He will not leave you unhappy on account of that love for me, which in this world it will never be allowed me to return. Farewell!"
The first part of this letter awakened in Gordon keen remorse and a faltering of purpose, but the latter filled him with a joy that excluded every other feeling.
"She loves me!" he exclaimed; and, as though registering a vow, he added aloud, "And nothing—God help me!—nothing shall keep us apart."
Walking to a point of the landscape that commanded a view of the convent, he remained there while the twilight fell, revolving how he was to surmount the remaining barriers between them, for these now seemed hardly more than cobwebs to be brushed aside by his hand; and often, meanwhile, he looked towards the convent, as one might look longingly towards some forbidden shrine, which the coming night would enable him to approach.
VI.
A night for love it was. The great sun at setting had looked with steadfast eye at the convent standing lonely on its wide landscape, and had then thrown his final glance across the world towards the east; and the moon had quickly risen and hung about it the long silvery twilight of her heavenly watchfulness. The summer, too, which had been moving southward, now came slowly back, borne on warm airs that fanned the convent walls and sighed to its chaste lattices with the poetry of dead flowers and vanished songsters. But sighed in vain. With many a prayer, with many a cross on pure brow and shoulder and breast, with many a pious kiss of crucifix, the convent slept. Only some little novice, lying like a flushed figure of Sleep on a couch of snow, may have stirred to draw one sigh, as those zephyrs, toying with her warm hair, broke some earthly dream of too much tenderness. Or they may merely have cooled the feverish feet of a withered nun, who clasped her dry hands in ecstasy, as on her cavernous eyes there dawned a vision of the glories and rewards of Paradise. But no, not all slept. At an open window on the eastern side of the convent stood the sleepless one looking out into the largeness of the night like one who is lost in the largeness of her sorrow.