Helene seized her black head-dress and bursting into wild laughter rushed towards the door. She herself had fastened it, but she imagined that some one was holding it from without, and shook it, sobbing and laughing at the same time. Then without hesitation she turned the key, went out, passed Olia who, pale as a sheet, gazed at her without comprehension and ran down the stairs uttering unintelligible sounds.
A moment after she was hammering at the closed door of the church and uttering maledictions to the great alarm of Sister Seraphine, who ran to tell the abbess, making the sign of the cross and crying, "Saints preserve us! It was not for nothing that the wind last night blew so fiercely against the windows. It is a real sin of these young ones."
At the sound of Helene's wild cries the other nuns, frightened and half-dressed, left their cells and ran in the raw cold of the morning to help their unhappy sister.
Alas! she had misunderstood!
THE LUCK OF IVAN THE FORGETFUL
