“My dear child, why shouldn’t we be glad to have you back?  We were sorry to part with you.”

“That was different, that was different.”

These answers, and the manner in which they were spoken even more than the answers themselves, frightened the Prioress; but unable to think of what might have happened, she sat wondering, waiting for Evelyn to reveal herself.  The hour was late, and Evelyn showed no signs of speaking.  Perhaps it would be better to ring for one of the lay sisters, and ask her to show Evelyn to her room.

“You will stay here to-night?”

“Yes, if you will allow me.”

“Allow you, my dear child!  Why speak in this way?”

“Oh, Mother, I am done for, I am done for!”

“You haven’t told me yet what has happened.”

Evelyn did not answer; she seemed to have forgotten everything, or to be thinking of one thing, and unable to detach her thoughts from it sufficiently to answer the Prioress’s question.

“Your father—­”

“My father is dead,” she answered.  And the Prioress, imagining her father’s death to be the cause of this mental breakdown, spoke of the consolations of religion, which no doubt Mr. Innes had received, and which would enable Mr. Innes’s soul to appear before a merciful God for judgment.

“There is little in this life, my dear; we should not be sorry for those who leave it—­that is, if they leave it in a proper disposition of soul.”

“My father died after having received the Sacraments of the Church.  Oh, his death!” And thinking it well to encourage her to speak, the Prioress said: 

“Tell me, my dear, tell me; I can understand your grief and sympathise with you; tell me everything.”

And like one awakening Evelyn told how for days he had fluctuated between life and death, sometimes waking to consciousness, then falling back into a trance.  In spite of the hopes the doctors had held out to him he had insisted he was dying.

“‘I am worn to a thread,’ he said, ’I shall flicker like that candle when it reaches the socket, and then I shall go out.  But I am not afraid of death:  death is a great experience, and we are all better for every experience.  There is only one thing—­’

“He was thinking of his work, he was sorry he was called away before his work was done; and then he seemed to forget it, to be absorbed in things of greater importance.”

Sometimes the wind interrupted the Prioress’s attention, and she thought of the safety of her roofs; Evelyn noticed the wind, and her notice of it served to accentuate her terror.  “It is terror,” the Prioress said to herself, “rather than grief.”