you of my first
love. By the way, why always "first?" Is there, I wonder, a second love?

Don't go running on like this, you will say, but tell me rather how
you made your escape from the convent where you were to take your vows.
Well, dear, I don't know about the Carmelites, but the miracle of my own
deliverance was, I can assure you, most humdrum. The cries of an alarmed
conscience triumphed over the dictates of a stern policy--there's the
whole mystery. The sombre melancholy which seized me after you left
hastened the happy climax, my aunt did not want to see me die of a
decline, and my mother, whose one unfailing cure for my malady was a
novitiate, gave way before her.

So I am in Paris, thanks to you, my love! Dear Renee, could you have
seen me the day I found myself parted from you, well might you have
gloried in the deep impression you had made on so youthful a bosom. We
had lived so constantly together, sharing our dreams and letting our
fancy roam together, that I verily believe our souls had become welded
together, like those two Hungarian girls, whose death we heard about
from M. Beauvisage--poor misnamed being! Never surely was man better cut
out by nature for the post of convent physician!

Tell me, did you not droop and sicken with your darling?

In my gloomy depression, I could do nothing but count over the ties
which bind us. But it seemed as though distance had loosened them; I
wearied of life, like a turtle-dove widowed of her mate. Death smiled
sweetly on me, and I was proceeding quietly to die. To be at Blois, at
the Carmelites, consumed by dread of having to take my vows there, a
Mlle. de la Valliere, but without her prelude, and without my Renee! How
could I not be sick--sick unto death?

How different it used to be! That monotonous existence, where every hour
brings its duty, its prayer, its task, with such desperate regularity
that you can tell what a Carmelite sister is doing in any place, at any
hour of the night or day; that deadly dull routine, which crushes out
all interest in one's surroundings, had become for us two a world of
life and movement. Imagination had thrown open her fairy realms, and in
these our spirits ranged at will, each in turn serving as magic steed
to the other, the more alert quickening the drowsy; the world from
which our bodies were shut out became the playground of our fancy, which
reveled there in frolicsome adventure. The very _Lives of the Saints_
helped us t