. It is for you, not
for me that we must think."

"No," answered one of the women. "What is our life compared to a
priest's life?"

"Once outside the Abbaye de Chelles, I look upon myself as dead," added
the nun who had not left the house, while the Sister that had just
returned held out the little box to the priest.

"Here are the wafers... but I can hear some one coming up the stairs."

At this, the three began to listen. The sound ceased.

"Do not be alarmed if somebody tries to come in," said the priest.
"Somebody on whom we could depend was to make all necessary arrangements
for crossing the frontier. He is to come for the letters that I have
written to the Duc de Langeais and the Marquis de Beauseant, asking them
to find some way of taking you out of this dreadful country, and away
from the death or the misery that waits for you here."

"But are you not going to follow us?" the nuns cried under their breath,
almost despairingly.

"My post is here where the sufferers are," the priest said simply,
and the women said no more, but looked at their guest in reverent
admiration. He turned to the nun with the wafers.

"Sister Marthe," he said, "the messenger will say _Fiat Voluntas_ in
answer to the word _Hosanna_."

"There is some one on the stairs!" cried the other nun, opening a
hiding-place contrived in the roof.

This time it was easy to hear, amid the deepest silence, a sound echoing
up the staircase; it was a man's tread on the steps covered with dried
lumps of mud. With some difficulty the priest slipped into a kind of
cupboard, and the nun flung some clothes over him.

"You can shut the door, Sister Agathe," he said in a muffled voice.

He was scarcely hidden before three raps sounded on the door. The holy
women looked into each other's eyes for counsel, and dared not say a
single word.

They seemed both to be about sixty years of age. They had lived out of
the world for forty years, and had grown so accustomed to the life of
the convent that they could scarcely imagine any other. To them, as to
plants kept in a hot-house, a change of air meant death. And so, when
the grating was broken down one morning, they knew with a shudder that
they were free. The effect produced by the Revolution upon their simple
souls is easy to imagine; it produced a temporary imbecility not natural
to them. They could not bring the ideas learned in the convent into
harmony with life and its difficulties; they could not