it, but it need not
be discussed;" and, closing her portfolio, she rose to her feet.

"Sylvia," I exclaimed, springing up and stepping nearer to her, "it must
be discussed! Ever since I parted from you at the window of your
writing-room I have been yearning to speak to you. I do not understand
the actions of your family and friends, but I do know that those actions
were on your account and on mine. They knew I loved you. I have not in
the least concealed the fact that I loved you, and I hoped, Sylvia, that
you knew it."

She stood, her closed portfolio in one hand, her pen in the other, her
eyes downcast, and her face grave and quiet. "I cannot say," she
answered presently, "that I knew it, although sometimes I thought it was
so, but other times I thought it was not so. I was almost sure of it
when you took leave of me at the window, and tried to kiss my hand, and
were just about to say something which I knew I ought not to stay and
hear. It was when thinking about that morning, in fact,--and I thought
about it a great deal,--that I became convinced I must act very promptly
and earnestly in regard to my future life, and be true to the work I had
undertaken to do; and for this reason it was that I solemnly vowed to
devote the rest of my life to the House of Martha, to observe all its
rules and do its work."

"Sylvia," I gasped, "you cannot keep this vow. When you made it you did
not know I loved you. It cannot hold. It must be set aside."

She looked at me for a moment, and then her eyes again fell. "Do not
speak in that way," she said; "it is not right. Of course I was not sure
that you loved me, but I suspected it, and this was the very reason why
I took my vow."

"It is plain, then," I exclaimed bitterly, "that you did not love me;
otherwise you would never have done that!"

"Don't you think," said she, "that considering the sisterhood to which I
belong, we have already talked too much about that?"

If she had exhibited the least emotion, I think I should have burst out
into supplications that she would take the advice of her Mother
Superior; that she would listen to her friends; that she would do
anything, in fact, which would cause her to reconsider this step, which
condemned me to misery and her to a life for which she was totally
unfitted,--a career in her case of such sad misuse of every attribute of
mind and body that it wrung my heart to think of it. But she stood so
quiet, so determined, and with an ai