Salome seemed utterly unconscious of the superior’s presence.  She sat with her hands clasped upon her lap and her eyes fixed upon the floor.

“Salome, my daughter, how is it with you?” softly inquired the abbess, taking one of the limp, thin hands within her own, and tenderly pressing it.

“I am the queen of sorrow, crowned and frozen on my desert throne,” murmured the girl, in a trance-like abstraction.

“Salome, my child!” said the mother-superior, gazing anxiously into her stony face, whose eyes had never moved from their fixed stare; “Salome, my dear daughter, look at me.”

“‘I am the star of sorrow, pale and lonely in the wintry sky.’”

“My poor girl, what do you mean?”

“I read that somewhere, long ago,—­oh, so long ago, when I was a happy child, and yet I wept then for that solitary mourner as I am not able to weep now for myself, though it suits me just as much,” murmured Salome, in the same trance-like manner, still staring on the floor, as she continued: 

“Yes, just as much, just as much, for—­

“Never was lament begun
By any mourner under sun
That e’en it ended fit but one!”

“Salome, look at me, speak to me, my dear daughter,” said the abbess, tenderly pressing her hand, and seeking to catch her fixed and staring eyes.

Salome slowly raised those woeful eyes to the lady’s face, and asked: 

“Mother, good mother, did you ever know any one in all your life so heavily stricken as I am?”

The abbess put her arms around the young girl and drew her head down upon her own pitying bosom, as she replied: 

“Have I ever known one so heavily stricken as you?  My child, I cannot tell.  ‘The heart knoweth its own bitterness,’ and one cannot weigh the grief of another.  Salome, you have been heavily smitten; but so have many others.  Daughter!  I never do speak of my own sorrows.  They are past, and ‘they come not back again.’  But I think it might do you good to hear of them now.  Child! like you, I never knew a mother’s love; but there were three beings in the world whom I loved, as you love, with inordinate and idolatrous affection.  They were my noble father, my only brother, and my affianced husband.  Salome, in the Revolution of ’48, my father was assassinated in the streets of Paris, as yours was in his chamber at Lone.  My brother, true as steel to his sovereign, was guillotined as a traitor to the Republican party.  Last, and hardest to bear, my affianced lover—­he on whom my soul was stayed in all my troubles, as if any one weak mortal could be a lasting stay to another in her utmost need—­my affianced lover, false to me as yours to you, was shot and killed in a duel by the lover, or husband, of a woman, for whom he had left his promised bride!  Daughter, did I ever know any one who was so heavily stricken as yourself?” gravely inquired the abbess, laying her hand upon the bowed head of her guest.