et; the desert sun had bronzed him, his features must have been
harsher."

"Paint him as God inspires you. This evening, during vespers, I looked
at your Holy Virgin the whole time."

"You think it good."

"It is perfect. Her sad eyes, her inspired face seem to say that she
knows her divine Son will suffer for humanity."

"Well, but Sister Seraphine is not pleased with it."

"What does she say?" asked Helene with a smile.

"That it is hardly befitting to have beautiful pictures in convents,
that the eyes of nuns ought not to dwell on the works of sinners."

"God bless her! She grumbles, but she is good at bottom. When I was ill,
before you came, she hardly ever left me. Here we are at my door."

Helene and the novice Olia rapidly ascended the steps of the staircase,
shaking the water from their cloaks. When they reached her well-warmed
room, Helene took off her short black pelisse and the cap which
concealed her hair. Her dwelling had two stages; Olia, her guest, lodged
and worked on the ground floor; Helene occupied the upper one. The
furniture was very simple--a table of white wood, a small very hard sofa
covered with brown holland, two old arm-chairs and straw-bottomed chairs
ranged along the wall. Above the sofa hung the portrait of some unknown
nun with dark eyes shadowed by a black veil and pale wrinkled lips. In
one corner, a lamp burned before an icon in a gold frame.

Helene was not yet thirty years old; her face, pale and thin, had
already assumed the monastic expression, but her refined features were
still beautiful; her large proud eyes recalled by their sadness and
their passionate expression Carlo Dolce's martyrs. One could guess that
in this soul which had already long suffered, the sacrifice was not yet
consummated, and the struggle still continued. In those dark eyes there
often came also the poignant look of physical suffering; her face showed
signs of sleepless nights, suppressed tears and sobs choked down.

Olia, with her sharp ear, heard her sometimes leap from her bed, run to
the window, open it and fall on her knees in prayer. It was not the
conventual life which weighed on Helene, but that which she had left
outside the walls. Her life in the convent was pleasant and easy; the
inmates had for her the regard which a sister deserves who brings a
considerable fortune, and who was, moreover, highly cultured, a fact
which lent peculiar distinction to the community. When illustrious
benefact