"But we must," said Amabel.
"You need not, if you will listen. Suppose you declare to take the veil and remain here. This woman has no force wherewith to take you away, and she will have to go without you. Then if your father should send again, you could be hidden in some place about the building, or sent away to some other house where he would never find you."
I looked at Amabel in decided alarm, thinking that if she staid I must stay too, and not disposed to lose the prospect of change, which was growing more and more attractive every day.
"But would that be right?" asked Amabel. "I think I ought to obey my father."
"Not if he is a heretic," said Sister Angela.
"You don't know certainly that he is," said I.
"And, besides, how many nuns have taken the veil against the wishes of their nearest and dearest friends," added Sister Angela triumphantly. "Think how St. Agnes left her father's house and ran away to St. Francis in the middle of the night. Think of the blessed Mother de Chantal, the friend of St. Francis de Sales—how she left her children—and, though her eldest son threw himself prostrate on the door-sill, beseeching his mother with tears and cries, she stepped over his body and went her way as calmly as if nothing had happened."
There must have been some influence emanating from Mrs. Thorpe after all, for though I had been brought up to think the Mother de Chantal a model of all excellence, I began to conceive a disgust for her directly—I can't say that I have ever got over it.
Amabel did not say a word while Sister Angela went on urging the example of one saint after another, till she was stopped by sheer want of breath.
Then Amabel asked—