"Ma'am, I am sorry that you should think me capable of dishonourable conduct. The fact is, that I have just asked Miss Mildare to be my wife. And she consents."
A spasm passed over the pale face. So easily they leave us whom we have reared and tended, when the strange hand beckons and the new voice calls. But the Mother-Superior was not a woman to betray emotion. She drew her black nun's robe over the pierced mother-heart, and said calmly, holding out her hand to him:
"You will forgive me if I was unjust, knowing that she is dear to me. And now I shall ask you to leave us. Please tell the Sisters"—from habit she glanced at her worn gold watch—"we shall join them in ten minutes' time."
He bowed, and lifted his smasher hat from the grass, and took up the Lee-Metford carbine he had been carrying and had laid aside, and went to Lynette and took her passive hand, and bent over it and kissed it. It dropped by her side lifelessly when he released it. Her face was a mask void of life. He looked towards the Mother in distress. Her white hand imperiously motioned him away. He expostulated:
"Is it safe for two ladies, ma'am, so far from the town, without protection? Natives or white loafers may be hanging about."
"If you desire it, you can remain within hearing of a call. But go now."
He went, lightly striding down the sandy path between the reed-beds on the foreshore. She watched the tall, athletic figure until it swung round a bend and was lost to sight.
Then she went to the girl and touched her. And at the touch Lynette dropped as though she had been shot, and lay among the trodden grasses and the flaunting cowslips face downwards. A low, incessant moaning came from the muffled mouth. Her hands were knotted in her hair. She writhed like a crushed snake, and all of her slender neck and face that could be seen and the little ears that her clutching, twining fingers sometimes bared and sometimes covered were one burning, shameful red.
"Lynette! My dear one!" The Mother, wrung and torn with a very agony of tenderness and pity, knelt beside her, and began with gentle strength to untwine those clutching hands from the girl's hair. She prisoned both in one of hers, and passed the other arm beneath the slender rigid body, and lifted it up and held it in her strong embrace, silently until a moan, more articulate than the rest, voiced:
"Mother!"