“Why distrust God, my sisters?” he said, in a hollow but impressive voice.  “We chanted praises to his name amid the cries of victims and assassins at the convent.  If it pleased him to save me from that butchery, it was doubtless for some destiny which I shall accept without a murmur.  God protects his own, and disposes of them according to his will.  It is of you, not of me, that we should think.”

“No,” said one of the women:  “what is our life in comparison with that of a priest?”

“Ever since the day when I found myself outside of the Abbaye des Chelles,” said the nun beside the fire, “I have given myself up for dead.”

“Here,” said the one who had just come in, holding out the little box to the priest, “here are the sacramental wafers—­Listen!” she cried, interrupting herself.  “I hear some one on the stairs.”

At these words all three listened intently.  The noise ceased.

“Do not be frightened,” said the priest, “even if some one asks to enter.  A person on whose fidelity we can safely rely has taken measures to cross the frontier, and he will soon call here for letters which I have written to the Duc de Langeais and the Marquis de Beauseant, advising them as to the measures they must take to get you out of this dreadful country, and save you from the misery or the death you would otherwise undergo here.”

“Shall you not follow us?” said the two nuns softly, but in a tone of despair.

“My place is near the victims,” said the priest, simply.

The nuns were silent, looking at him with devout admiration.

“Sister Martha,” he said, addressing the nun who had fetched the wafers, “this messenger must answer ‘Fiat voluntas’ to the word ‘Hosanna.’”

“There is some one on the stairway,” exclaimed the other nun, hastily opening a hiding-place burrowed at the edge of the roof.

This time it was easy to hear the steps of a man sounding through the deep silence on the rough stairs, which were caked with patches of hardened mud.  The priest slid with difficulty into a narrow hiding-place, and the nuns hastily threw articles of apparel over him.

“You can shut me in, Sister Agatha,” he said, in a smothered voice.

He was scarcely hidden when three knocks upon the door made the sisters tremble and consult each other with their eyes, for they dared not speak.  Forty years’ separation from the world had made them like plants of a hot-house which wilt when brought into the outer air.  Accustomed to the life of a convent, they could not conceive of any other; and when one morning their bars and gratings were flung down, they had shuddered at finding themselves free.  It is easy to imagine the species of imbecility which the events of the Revolution, enacted before their eyes, had produced in these innocent souls.  Quite incapable of harmonizing their conventual ideas with the exigencies of ordinary life, not even comprehending their own situation, they were like children who had always been cared for, and who now, torn from their maternal providence, had taken to prayers as other children take to tears.  So it happened that in presence of immediate danger they were dumb and passive, and could think of no other defence than Christian resignation.