e devout; the former in
greater number and chiefly Americans, who were now and then whispered
silent by an old pauper zealous for the sanctity of the place. At the
stroke of twelve the Sisters entered two by two, followed by the
lady-superior with a prayerbook in her hand. She clapped the leaves of
this together in signal for them to kneel, to rise, to kneel again and
rise, while they repeated in rather harsh voices their prayers, and then
clattered out of the chapel as they had clattered in, with resounding
shoes. The two young girls at the head were very pretty, and all the pale
faces had a corpse-like peace. As Basil looked at their pensive sameness,
it seemed to him that those prettiest girls might very well be the twain
that he had seen here so many years ago, stricken forever young in their
joyless beauty. The ungraceful gowns of coarse gray, the blue checked
aprons, the black crape caps, were the same; they came and went with the
same quick tread, touching their brows with holy water and kneeling and
rising now as then with the same constrained and ordered movements. Would
it be too cruel if they were really the same persons? or would it be yet
more cruel if every year two girls so young and fair were self-doomed to
renew the likeness of that youthful death?

The visitors went about the hospital, and saw the old men and the little
children to whom these good pure lives were given, and they could only
blame the system, not the instruments or their work. Perhaps they did not
judge wisely of the amount of self-sacrifice involved, for they judged
from hearts to which love was the whole of earth and heaven; but
nevertheless they pitied the Gray Nuns amidst the unhomelike comfort of
their convent, the unnatural care of those alien little ones. Poor
'Soeurs Grises' in their narrow cells; at the bedside of sickness and age
and sorrow; kneeling with clasped hands and yearning eyes before the
bloody spectacle of the cross!--the power of your Church is shown far
more subtly and mightily in such as you, than in her grandest fanes or
the sight of her most august ceremonies, with praying priests, swinging
censers, tapers and pictures and images, under a gloomy heaven of
cathedral arches. There, indeed, the faithful have given their substance;
but here the nun has given up the most precious part of her woman's
nature, and all the tenderness that clings about the thought of wife and
mother.

"There are some things that always g