r. There was not one face of those files of
grey-gowned girls which, at stated hours, entered the chapel, knelt at
the altar, or stooped at painful labour through the stifling days,
which did not show a gleam. Stupid, vacant, vicious, morose, pretty,
sparkling, whatever the face might be, there was that expectation to
redeem or enhance it, to make it human, to make it womanish. There
was, or there would be, some day, any day, a lover outside--to whom it
would be the face of all faces.

Manuela had not been two hours in the company of her fellow-prisoners
before she was told that there were two ways of escape from the
Recogidas. Religion or marriage these were; but the religious
alternative was not discussed.

Sister Chucha, it transpired, had chosen that way--"But do you wonder?"
cried the girl who told Manuela, with shrill scorn. Most of the
sisters had once been penitents--"_Vaya_! Look at them, my dear!"
cried this young Amazon, conscious of her own charms.

She was a plump Andalusian, black-eyed, merry, and quick to change her
moods. Love had sent her to Saint Mary Magdalene, and love would take
her out again.

That Chucha, she owned, was a kind soul. She always put the pretty
ones to housework--"it gives us a chance at the windows. I have
Fernando, who works at the sand-carting in the river. He never fails
to look up this way. Some day he will ask for me." She peered at
herself in a pail of water, and fingered her cap daintily. "How does
my skirt hang now, Manuela? Too short, I fancy. Did you ever see such
shoes as they give you here! Lucky that nobody can see you."

This was the strain of everybody's talk in the House of Las
Recogidas--in the whitewashed galleries where they walked in squads
under the eye of a nun who sat reading a good book against the wall, in
the court where they lay in the shade to rest, prone, with their faces
hidden in their arms, or with knees huddled up and eyes fixed in a
stare. They talked to each other in the hoarse, tearful staccato of
Spain, which, beginning low, seems to gather force and volume as it
runs, until, like a beck in flood, it carries speaker and listener over
the bar and into tossing waves of yeasty water.

Manuela, through all, kept her thoughts to herself, and spoke nothing
of her own affairs. There may have been others like her, fixed to the
great achievement of justifying themselves to their own standard: she
had no means of knowing. Her stan