n every line of her face, every fold of her dress, in
the quiet of her small, white hands, resting motionless against her
skirt.

Juanita stood looking at her with flashing eyes, with her head thrown
back, with clenched hands,

"Then I will go somewhere else. But I do not understand you. You always
wanted me to go into religion."

Sor Teresa held up one hand and cut short her speech. For the habit of
obedience is so strong that clear-headed men will deliberately go to
their death rather than relinquish it. The gesture was known to Juanita.
It was dreaded in the school.

"Think--" said Sor Teresa. "Think before you say that."

"Well," argued Juanita, "if you did not urge me in words, you used every
means in your power to induce me to take the veil--to make it impossible
for me to do anything else."

"Think!" urged Sor Teresa. "Think again. Do not include me in such
generalities without thinking."

Juanita paused. She ran back in her mind over a hundred incidents of
school life, remembered, as such are, with photographic accuracy.

"Well," she admitted at length. "You did your best to make me hate it--at
all events."

"Ah!" said Sor Teresa, with a slow smile.

"Then you did not want me to go into religion--" Juanita came a step
nearer and peered into Sor Teresa's face. She might as well have sought
an answer in a face of stone.

"Answer me," she said impatiently.

"All are not suited for the religious life," answered the Sister Superior
after the manner of her teaching. "I have known many such, and I have
seen much sorrow arising from a mistaken sense of duty. I have heard of
lives wrecked by it--I have known of two."

Juanita who had moved away impatiently, now turned and looked at Sor
Teresa. The gloom of evening was gathering in the little bare room. The
stillness of the convent was oppressive.

"Were you suited to the religious life?" asked the girl suddenly.

But Sor Teresa made no answer.

Juanita sat suddenly down. Her movements were quick and impulsive still,
as they had been when she was a schoolgirl. When she had arrived at the
convent she had felt hungry and tired. The feelings came back to her with
renewed intensity now. She was sick at heart. The gray twilight within
these walls was like the gloom of a hopeless life.

"I wonder who the other was," she said, half to herself. For the world
was opening out before her like a great book hitherto closed. The lives
of men and women had gained d