ne
saw to it that they were. It was assuredly by the Will of Heaven that
the child of Diane Wielitzska had been led to her very doors, and to
the subject of her chastening Catherine brought much thought and
discrimination. _"If you hurt people enough you can make them good."_
It had been her brother's bitter creed and it was hers. Pain, in
Catherine's idea, was the surest means of chastening, and Magda was
to remember her year at the sisterhood by two things--by the deadly,
unbearable monotony of its daily routine and by her first acquaintance
with actual bodily pain.

Her health had always been magnificent, and--with the exception of the
trivial punishments of childhood and those few moments when she was
sitting for the picture of Circe--physical suffering was unknown to her.
The penances, therefore, which Catherine appointed her--to kneel for
a stated length of time until it seemed as though every muscle she
possessed were stretched to breaking-point, to fast when her whole
healthy young body craved for food, to be chastened with flagellum, a
scourge of knotted cords--all these grew to be a torment almost beyond
endurance.

Almost! . . . Yet in the beginning the thought of Michael sustained her
triumphantly.

It was a curious sensation--that first stroke of the flagellum.

As Magda, unversed in physical suffering, felt the cords shock against
her flesh, she was conscious of a strange uplifting of spirit. This,
then, this smarting, blinding thing called pain, was the force that
would drive the will to do evil out of her soul.

She waited expectantly--almost exultantly--for the second fall of the
thongs. The interval between seemed endless. Sister Agnetia was very
deliberate, pausing between each stroke. She knew to a nicety the value
of anticipation as a remedial force in punishment.

Again the cords descended on the bared shoulders. Magda winced away from
them, shivering. For a moment Sister Agnetia's arm hung flaccid, the
cords of the flagellum pendant and still.

"Are you submitting to the discipline, Sister Penitentia?" came her
voice. It was an unpleasant voice, suggestive of a knife that has been
dipped in oil.

Magda caught her breath.

"Yes . . . yes . . . I submit myself."

Dimly she felt that by means of this endurance she would win back
Michael, cleanse herself to receive his love.

"I submit," she repeated in a rapt whisper of self-surrender.

Sister Agnetia's voice swam unctuously into