f '48,
my father was assassinated in the streets of Paris, as yours was in his
chamber at Lone. My brother, true as steel to his sovereign, was
guillotined as a traitor to the Republican party. Last, and hardest to
bear, my affianced lover--he on whom my soul was stayed in all my
troubles, as if any one weak mortal could be a lasting stay to another
in her utmost need--my affianced lover, false to me as yours to you, was
shot and killed in a duel by the lover, or husband, of a woman, for whom
he had left his promised bride! Daughter, did I ever know any one who was
so heavily stricken as yourself?" gravely inquired the abbess, laying her
hand upon the bowed head of her guest.

"Oh, yes, good mother, you have," murmured the weeping girl, in a voice
full of tears. "Your fate has been very like my own--you, like me, were
motherless from your infancy; you, like me, spent your childhood and
youth in this very convent school. Your father, like mine, met his death
at the hands of an assassin; your lover, false as mine, abandoned you for
a guilty love. Ah! your sorrows have been very like mine, only much
heavier and harder to bear." And Salome drew the caressing hands of the
abbess to her lips and kissed them over and over again, as she repeated,
"Oh, yes, good mother, much heavier and harder to bear than mine."

"I do not know that, my daughter; but I do know, if I had set myself down
a grieving egotist, to brood over my own individual troubles, in a world
full of troubles, needing ministrations, I should have lost my reason, if
not my soul."

"But you came back to your convent, as I have come, for refuge," said
Salome.

"Yes, I came here to give my life to the Lord; not in idle, selfish
prayers and meditations for my own soul's sake; no, but in an active,
useful life of work. And I have found deep peace, deep joy. So will you,
my beloved child, if you take the same way. But you must begin by
shutting the doors of your soul against the thoughts of your sorrow, and
especially by banishing the image of your false and guilty lover every
time it presents itself to your mind."

"Oh, mother! mother! I loved him so! I loved him so!" cried Salome,
bursting into a paroxysm of sobs and tears, the first tears she had been
able to shed over her awful sorrows.

The abbess was glad to see them; they broke up the fatal apathy as a
storm disperses malaria. She gathered the weeping girl to her bosom, and
let her sob and cry there to her