"Not she!" said Amabel with decision. "She would not care if the whole family perished, so she were safe. Lucy, that girl is a hypocrite!"
"You should not say so—she is very devout," said I; for I rather believed in Desireè's conversion, though I am afraid I did not like her any the better for it.
"Devout or not, she is a hypocrite!" persisted Amabel in a tone which surprised me. I had never heard her speak so bitterly, and indeed she rarely spoke ill of any one. "She despises dear Mother Prudentia, whose shoes she is not fit to carry, and she hates Mother Superior. I have seen the looks she casts at them when she thinks herself unobserved. But come, we must not be here. The bell will ring in a moment."
Dénise lingered a few weeks, and then died full of peace and hope. Her death was followed, not very long after, by that of Mother Assistant and one of the sisters, which reduced the number of the professed members of the household to eight, beside the superiors.
"Our band grows smaller and smaller, and Sister Augustine is failing fast," I heard Mother Prudentia say after Sister Agnes was buried.
We had all gone to pray at the grave, next day, and I was helping Mother Bursar to smooth the turf and set some violet roots in it.
"There will soon be no one left, and what will become of the dear children?" continued Mother Prudentia.
"The Lord will provide, dear sister," answered the Mother. "Our numbers are indeed small, but we must make up for it by more earnestness. We have always, as yet, been able to keep up our constant devotion to the Holy Sacrament of the Altar."
I heard no more at that time, but what I did hear set me to wondering what would become of us if any more were taken away. This same constant devotion to the Holy Sacrament must have been great drain on the strength of our little community, as I remember it. It had been established by the Mother Angelique in Port Royal some years before Madame de Longueville and the Bishop of Langris had set up, with this same Mother's assistance, the short-lived sub-order of Daughters of the Holy Sacrament.
From morning till night and from night till morning, no matter what might be the weather, a sister was always on her knees in the church, before the altar on which was the consecrated wafer. She might seek relief by lying on her face or by leaning against a post which was placed for that purpose. Hence the sisters usually spoke of "being at the post." (I never heard, by the way, that when our Lord was in this world in bodily presence, he kept the women who ministered to him on their knees before him. Even Mary sat at his feet.) This duty, which was not so very hard divided among forty or fifty people, was certainly a severe burden when it came to be divided among ten or twelve. It makes me vexed whenever I remember how much strength, both of body and mind, our good sisters used to waste on just such performances as these.