“Happy! Well, for you it may be. Your father is of the old religion, is he not?”
“I do not know, for he says naught and will hear naught about it. You know he will not join the church here, although mother belongs to it, and when we all were christened he said lay baptism was better than none; but he goes to meeting as we all do, and gives as much as any man to the support of the minister. He knows best, doubtless, and mother and I do not much care to know all his mind.”
“Oh, ay!” replied Gillian, who had listened attentively, and now shook her head as if discarding some plan. Then lowering her gaze from Lora’s face to the fire, now crumbling into caverns, and vistas, and toppling turrets, and fantastic feathery piles of ashes, she slowly said,—
“’Tis out of possibility, but I would well have liked to see you a sister of Donna Maria de los Dolores. It would have been a heaven on earth to you, and the guimpe and coif and barb ought to suit you as jewels do me.
“Oh ’twas so fair there betimes!” continued she with sudden passion. “I mind me of one even just before my father fetched me away to see my mother die, one even in deep midsummer, and after vespers we walked in the garden, the sisters and another girl and I. Such a garden, Lora, oh, such a garden as you never dreamed of in these hateful northern solitudes! Closed all round with a high gray stone wall covered with passion flowers and jessamine and gay trumpet flowers, a bank of bloom and greenery that seemed to us the end of the world, for the banana-trees no more than reached the top of it, and inside, smooth green walks bordered with every flower that grows, and more especially all that are sweet and bewildering of perfume; for, Lora, when a woman puts on a nun’s robes she does not cease to be a woman, and while with the one hand she flings her flask of essences and her pomander box into the fire, with the other she plants a bed of pinks, to flaunt their color and send up their spicy odors for her delight.”
“Who cared for the garden at Los Dolores?” asked Lora, vaguely uneasy at the other’s tone.
“Oh, the sisters one and another. ’Twas rare recreation for them, and never permitted to those in penitence. They even mowed the lawns, and shaved the paths, and rolled the gravel, for it was a great and wide garden, with room in it for one to get away alone and entertain the blue devils in solitude.”
“Nay, Gillian, but could devils, blue or black, ever overpass that high wall you told of?”
“Could they? Oh, well—at least they never would have found you when they searched for prey, so much I believe, maid Lora.”
“But tell me more of the garden.”