a clock stop when it has run down.

But the three old nuns belonged to a past generation, and it was not
probable that the younger Sisters would ever be like them. The Mother
Superior was a small and active woman, with quick black eyes, a
determined mouth, and a strangely pale face. She seemed to be
incapable of being tired. Among themselves the novices called her the
little white volcano. When the one who had invented the epithet
repeated it to Monsignor Saracinesca in confession, and he gently told
her that it was wrong to speak disrespectfully of her superior, she
rather pertly asked him whether any one who lived under a volcano
could fail to 'respect' it; whereat he shook his head gravely inside
the confessional, but his spiritual mouth twitched with amusement, in
spite of himself. The four novices were inclined to distrust Angela at
first, however, as she was not even a postulant, and it was not till
she became one of themselves that she was initiated into their
language.

It was not long before this took place, however. From the first, she
showed a most unusual aptitude in learning the mechanical part of her
profession, and her extraordinary memory made it easy for her to
remember the lectures which were given for the nurses three times a
week, generally by the house surgeon, but occasionally by the great
Doctor Pieri, who had been a pupil of Basini of Padua and was a
professor in the University of Rome. He showed especial interest in
Angela, and the pert little novice wickedly suggested that he was
falling in love with her; but the truth was that he at once
distinguished in her the natural gifts which were soon to make her the
most valuable nurse at his disposal.

The Mother Superior expected that she would become vain and gave her
some energetic lectures on the evils of conceit. There was a sort of
fury of good about the pale woman that carried everything before it.
She was just, but her righteous anger was a ready firebrand, and when
it burst into flame, as often happened, her eloquence was
extraordinary. Her face might have been carved out of white ice, but
her eyes glowed like coals and her words came low, quick, and clear,
and wonderfully to the point. As a girl, her temper had been terrific,
and had estranged her from her own family; but her unconquerable will
had forged it into a weapon that never failed her in a just cause and
was never drawn in an unjust one. Monsignor Saracinesca sometimes
thought t