at last that they mistook God's meaning!--
that I might have had His love and Margaret's too!--nay, even that I
might have had His love and that other, of which it is so wicked in me
to think, and yet something is in me that will keep ever thinking! O
holy and immaculate Virgin, O Saint Margaret, Saint Agnes, and all ye
blessed maidens that dwell in Heaven, have mercy on me, miserable
sinner! My soul is earth-bound, and I cannot rise. I am the bride of
Christ, and I cannot cease lamenting my lost earthly bridal.

But hath Christ a thousand brides? They say holy Church is His Bride,
and she is one. Then how can all the vestals in all the convents be
each of them His bride? I suppose I cannot understand as I ought to do.
Perhaps I should have understood better if that _might have been_ had
been--if I had not stood withering all these years, taught to crush down
this poor dried heart of mine. They will not let me have any thing to
love. When Mother Ada thought I was growing too fond of little
Erneburg, she took her away from me and gave her to Sister Roberga to
teach. Yet the child seemed to soften my heart and do it good.

"Are the holy Mother and the blessed saints not enough for thee?" she
said.

But the blessed saints do not look at me and smile, as Erneburg did.
She doth it even now, across the schoolroom--though I have never been
permitted to speak word to her since Mother Ada took her from me. And I
must smile back again,--ay, however many times I have to lick a cross on
the oratory floor for doing it. Why ought I not? Did not our Lord
Himself take the little children into His arms? I am sure He must have
smiled on them--they would have been frightened if He had not done so.

They say I have but a poor wit, and am fit to teach only babes.

"And not fit to teach them," saith Mother Ada--in a tone which I am sure
people would call cross and snappish if she were an extern--"for her
fancy all runs to playing with them, rather than teaching them any thing
worth knowing."

Ah, Mother Ada, but is not love worth knowing? or must they have that
only from their happy mothers, who not being holy women are permitted to
love, and not from a poor, crushed, hopeless heart like mine?

There is nothing in our life to look forward to. "Till death" is the
vow of the Sisterhood. And death seems a poor hope.

I know, of course, what Mother Ada would say: that I have no vocation,
and my heart is in the world and o