The letter lay upon the floor, where it had dropped from the unconscious hand. It lay there for Sister Tobias, and might lie. If the Mother willed to tell its contents, she would tell. If not, the little old nun, her faithful daughter, would never ask or seek to know.
She opened her great eyes at last, and smiled up at the tender, wrinkled ugliness of the long, sheep-like face in the close white linen wimple.
"Say nothing to anybody. I was overdone," she said, and rose. Sister Tobias picked up the letter, and gave it to her. There was a Boer mutton-fat candle flaring draughtily in an iron sconce upon the wall. The Mother moved across the little room, and burned the letter to the last blank corner, and trod the fallen ashes into impalpable powder. Then she helped Sister Tobias to remove every trace left, and obviate every danger that might result from her late toil, and rejoined her quiet family of daughters as though nothing had happened.
They recalled afterwards how cheerful and how placid she had seemed that night. Her smile had a heart-breaking sweetness, and her voice made wonderful melody even in their accustomed ears.
They supped on the little that they had, and chatted, said the night-prayers, and went, aching, all of them, with unsatisfied hunger, to bed. You may conjecture the orderly, modest method of retiring, each Sister vanishing in turn behind a curtained screen to disrobe, lave, and vest herself for sleep, emerging in due time in the loose, full conventual night-garment of thick white twilled linen, high-throated, monkish-sleeved, and girdled with a thin cotton cord, her face, plain or pretty, young or elderly, framed in the close little white drawn cap of many tucks.
Then, the ladder having been removed, and the tarpaulin pulled over its hole, the lights were extinguished, and only the subdued crimson glow of the tiny lamp that burned before the silver Crucifix that had stood above the Tabernacle on the altar of the Convent chapel burned ruby in the thick, hot dark, where, upon the little iron beds, each divided by a narrow, white-cotton-covered board into two constricted berths, the row of quiet figures lay outstretched, her Breviary upon every Sister's pillow, and her beads about her wrist.
The Mother lay very still, seeing the hideous sentences of the anonymous letter written in hellish characters of mocking flame on the background of the dark. She prayed as the wrecked may when the ship beneath their feet is going down. Beside her Lynette, not daring to disturb the silence, suddenly grown rigid and awful, lay aching with the loneliness of living on the other side of the wide gulf of division that had suddenly yawned between.
She had spent the day at the Hospital with Sister Hilda-Antony and Sister Cleophée. She had not seen Beauvayse. But a note had come from him, that had warmed the heart she hid it near. His dearest, he called her—his own beautiful beloved. He could not snatch a minute from duty even to kiss his darling's sweetest eyes, but on Sunday they would be together all day. And would she not meet him at the Convent on Thursday, at twilight, when the shelling stopped, and it would be safe for his beloved to venture there? She must not come alone. Dear old Sister Tobias would bring her, and play Mrs. Grundy's part. And, with a thousand kisses, he was hers in life and death.
Lynette's first love-letter, and it seemed to her so beautiful. It laid a hand upon her heart that thrilled, and was warm and strong. The hand said "Mine!"
His. She would be his one day—soon; and there would be no more mysteries between the man and the woman welded by God's ordinance into husband and wife. She shivered a little at the thought of that intimate, peculiar, utter oneness. And then, with a sickening, horrible sinking of the heart, she realised that, however well such a secret as that she guarded might be hidden before the priest and the clergyman made they twain One, it must be known of both afterwards, or else be for ever threatening to start through the burying earth, crying, "I am here. How came you to forget?"