A slight noise made him quiver.  The brown curtain was drawn back; he saw in the half-light a woman standing, but her face was hidden from him by the projection of a veil, which lay in many folds upon her head.  According to the rule of the Order she was clothed in the brown garb whose color has become proverbial.  The general could not see the naked feet, which would have told him the frightful emaciation of her body; yet through the thick folds of the coarse robe that swathed her, his heart divined that tears and prayers and passion and solitude had wasted her away.

The chill hand of a woman, doubtless the Mother-superior, held back the curtain, and the general, examining this unwelcome witness of the interview, encountered the deep grave eyes of an old nun, very aged, whose clear, even youthful, glance belied the wrinkles that furrowed her pale face.

“Madame la duchesse,” he said, in a voice shaken by emotion, to the Sister, who bowed her head, “does your companion understand French?”

“There is no duchess here,” replied the nun.  “You are in presence of Sister Theresa.  The woman whom you call my companion is my Mother in God, my superior here below.”

These words, humbly uttered by a voice that once harmonized with the luxury and elegance in which this woman had lived queen of the world of Paris, that fell from lips whose language had been of old so gay, so mocking, struck the general as if with an electric shock.

“My holy Mother speaks only Latin and Spanish,” she added.

“I understand neither.  Dear Antoinette, make her my excuses.”

As she heard her name softly uttered by a man once so hard to her, the nun was shaken by emotion, betrayed only by the light quivering of her veil, on which the light now fully fell.

“My brother,” she said, passing her sleeve beneath her veil, perhaps to wipe her eyes, “my name is Sister Theresa.”

Then she turned to the Mother, and said to her in Spanish a few words which the general plainly heard.  He knew enough of the language to understand it, perhaps to speak it.  “My dear Mother, this gentleman presents to you his respects, and begs you to excuse him for not laying them himself at your feet; but he knows neither of the languages which you speak.”

The old woman slowly bowed her head; her countenance took an expression of angelic sweetness, tempered, nevertheless, by the consciousness of her power and dignity.

“You know this gentleman?” she asked, with a piercing glance at the Sister.

“Yes, my Mother.”

“Retire to your cell, my daughter,” said the Superior in a tone of authority.

The general hastily withdrew to the shelter of the curtain, lest his face should betray the anguish these words cost him; but he fancied that the penetrating eyes of the Superior followed him even into the shadow.  This woman, arbiter of the frail and fleeting joy he had won at such cost, made him afraid; he trembled, he whom a triple range of cannon could not shake.