"You think, then, that—he killed himself?" asked Monseigneur with directness.
"I dare not think!" She was searching in her table drawer with tears dropping on her hands. "I can only pray that the autopsy of the surgeon will not reveal that the death was not natural. Look, Monseigneur!—this is his ring. A big black-and-white pearl. And under the pearl, which lifts up—is a little box for something.... A relic perhaps—or a portrait, or a lock of a friend's hair."
"It might serve as a reliquary—at need, my child," said Monseigneur, examining the platinum setting. He gave one swift glance at the unsuspicious Aumonier and another at the innocent nun. He peered again narrowly at the empty hiding-place, to the shallow sides of which a few atoms of glittering grey dust were adhering. He lifted the ring to his nose and sniffed, tapped the little box on his thumb-nail, and touched his tongue to one of the glittering grey specks. Then he hastily spat in his handkerchief, and thunder-clouds sat on the furrowed forehead over the great hooked beak.
"Listen!"
The nun started and grew paler still. She hurried to the glazed doors opening on the garden and threw them wide apart. As the chill outer air rushed in, sporting with the scant white locks of M. l'Aumonier, fluttering the purple lappets at the throat of Monseigneur, and tugging as with invisible hands at the Sister's thin black veil, approaching footsteps crunched over the sloppy gravel of the cloister walk.
The small stout figure of the Sister-Keeper of the mortuary headed the small, solemn procession. She held up her habit out of the slush, and carried as well as a mammoth iron doorkey, a small bunch of spring flowers.
A stretcher-squad of the French Red Cross followed the Sister of the mortuary. In life the man they bore must have been a magnificent specimen of humanity. In death the length of his rigid form appeared phenomenal. The black velvet pall, over which had been draped the black-red-white German War Ensign, was far too short to cover the stiff blanket-swathed feet. That they projected beyond the stretcher-end with an effect of arrogance and obstinacy, was the thought that occurred to one of the three people gathered in a little group upon the threshold of the cloister-doors.
"Monseigneur.... My Father! ..." Sister Catherine was speaking in suppressed but eager accents. "It is Number Twenty. They are taking him to the mortuary. The Sister-Keeper promised to carry flowers as a sign that all was well. You understand, do you not? The surgeons have decided—thanks be to God!—that the poor man did not poison himself!"
She dropped to her knees and began to say a decade of her Rosary, the wooden beads running between her fingers like brown water as she prayed. The priests made the Sign of the Cross silently as the body was borne past. When the last feather of the Black Eagle had vanished, and the crunching of footsteps on sloppy gravel had thinned away in distance, the nun rose.
"You feel happier now, my sister, do you not?" Monseigneur asked kindly.