igion. My
vocation and my will were never asked. We--Margaret and I--were in
Queen Isabel's way; and she plucked us and flung us over the hedge like
weeds that cumbered her garden. It was all by reason she hated our
father: but what he had done to make her thus hate him, that I never
knew. And I was an affianced bride when I was torn away from all that
should have made life glad, and prisoned here for ever more. How my
heart keeps whispering to me, "It might have been!" There is a woman
who comes for doles to the convent gate, and at times she hath with her
the loveliest little child I ever saw; and they smile on each other,
mother and child, and look so happy when they smile. Why was I cut off
thus from all that makes other women happy? Nobody belongs to me;
nobody loves me. The very thought of being loved, the very wish to be
so, is sin in _me_, who am a veiled nun. But why was it made sin? It
was not sin aforetime. _He_ might have loved me, he whom I never saw
after I was flung over the convent wall--he who was mine and not hers to
whom I suppose they will have wedded him. But I know nothing: I shall
never know. And they say it is sin to think of him. Every thing seems
to be sin; and loving people more especially. Mother Ada told me one
day that she saw in me an inclination to be too much drawn to Mother
Alianora, and warned me to mortify it, because she was my father's
sister, and therefore there was cause to fear it might be an indulgence
of the flesh. And now, these weeks past, my poor, dry, withered heart
seems to have a little faint pulsation in it, and goes out to Margaret--
my sister Margaret with the strange dark eyes, my own sister who is an
utter stranger to me. Must I crush the poor dry thing back, and hurt
all that is left to hurt of it? Oh, will no saint in Heaven tell me why
it is, that God, who loveth men, will not have monks and nuns to love
each other? The Lord Prior saith He is a jealous God, and demands that
we give all our love to Him. Yet I may love the blessed saints without
any derogation to Him--but I must not love mine own sister. It is very
perplexing. Do earthly fathers forbid their children to love one
another, lest they should not be loved themselves sufficiently? I
should have thought that love, like other things, increased by exercise,
and that loving my sister would rather help me to love God. But they
say not. I suppose they know.

Ah me, if I should find out