hen the service should be over.

CHAPTER XV. NOTRE-DAME DE BELLAISE*

There came a man by middle day, He spied his sport and went away, And
brought the king that very night, And brake my bower and slew my knight. The Border Widow's Lament

*[footnote: Bellaise is not meant for a type of all nunneries, but
of the condition to which many of the lesser ones had come before the
general reaction and purification of the seventeenth century.]

That same Latin hymn which Cecily St. John daily chanted in her own
chamber was due from the choir of Cistercian sisters in the chapel of
the Convent of Our Lady at Bellaise, in the Bocage of Anjou; but there
was a convenient practice of lumping together the entire night and
forenoon hours at nine o'clock in the morning, and all the evening ones
at Compline, so that the sisters might have undisturbed sleep at
night and entertainment by day. Bellaise was a very comfortable little
nunnery, which only received richly dowered inmates, and was therefore
able to maintain them in much ease, though without giving occasion to a
breath of scandal. Founded by a daughter of the first Angevin Ribaumont,
it had become a sort of appanage for the superfluous daughters of the
house, and nothing would more have amazed its present head, Eustacie
Barbe de Ribaumont,--conventually known as La Mere Marie Seraphine de
St.-Louis, and to the world as Madame de Bellaise,--than to be accused
of not fulfilling the intentions of the Bienheureuse Barbe, the
foundress, or of her patron St. Bernard.

Madame de Bellaise was a fine-looking woman of forty, in a high state
of preservation, owing to the healthy life she had led. Her eyes were of
brilliant, beautiful black her complexion had a glow, her hair--for she
wore it visibly--formed crisp rolls of jetty ringlets on her temples,
almost hiding her close white cap. The heavy thick veil was tucked back
beneath the furred purple silk hood that fastened under her chin. The
white robes of her order were not of serge, but of the finest cloth, and
were almost hidden by a short purple cloak with sleeves, likewise lined
and edged with fur, and fastened on the bosom with a gold brooch. Her
fingers, bearing more rings than the signet of her house, were concealed
in embroidered gauntlets of Spanish leather. One of them held an
ivory-handled riding-rod, the other the reins of the well-fed jennet, on
which the lady, on a fine afternoon, late i