Thereupon they huddled up close together, alarmed at these words, but wishing to know more.

“And is it enough to love, to suffer?” asked a sister.

“Oh, yes!” cried Sister Ovide.

“You love just for one little once a pretty gentleman,” replied Ursula, “and you have the chance of seeing your teeth go one by one, your hair fall off, your cheeks grow pallid, and your eyebrows drop, and the disappearance of your prized charms will cost you many a sigh.  There are poor women who have scabs come upon their noses, and others who have a horrid animal with a hundred claws, which gnaws their tenderest parts.  The Pope has at last been compelled to excommunicate this kind of love.”

“Ah! how lucky I am to have had nothing of that sort,” cried the novice.

Hearing this souvenir of love, the sisters suspected that the little one had gone astray through the heat of a crucifix of Poissy, and had been joking with the Sister Ovide, and drawing her out.  All congratulated themselves on having so merry a jade in their company, and asked her to what adventure they were indebted for that pleasure.

“Ah!” said she, “I let myself be bitten by a big flea, who had already been baptised.”

At this speech, the sister of the bass note could not restrain a second sign.

“Ah!” said Sister Ovide, “you are bound to give us the third.  If you spoke that language in the choir, the abbess would diet you like Sister Petronille; so put a sordine in your trumpet.”

“Is it true that you knew in her lifetime that Sister Petronille on whom God bestowed the gift of only going twice a year to the bank of deposit?” asked Sister Ursula.

“Yes,” replied Ovide.  “And one evening it happened she had to remain enthroned until matins, saying, ‘I am here by the will of God.’  But at the first verse, she was delivered, in order that she should not miss the office.  Nevertheless, the late abbess would not allow that this was an especial favour, granted from on high, and said that God did not look so low.  Here are the facts of the case.  Our defunct sister, whose canonisation the order are now endeavouring to obtain at the court of the Pope, and would have had it if they could have paid the proper costs of the papal brief; this Petronille, then, had an ambition to have her name included in the Calendar of Saints, which was in no way prejudicial to our order.  She lived in prayer alone, would remain in ecstasy before the altar of the virgin, which is on the side of the fields, and pretend so distinctly to hear the angels flying in Paradise, that she was able to hum the tunes they were singing.  You all know that she took from them the chant Adoremus, of which no man could have invented a note.  She remained for days with her eyes fixed like the star, fasting, and putting no more nourishment into her body that I could into my eye.  She had made a vow never to taste meat, either cooked or raw, and ate only a crust of bread a day; but on