“Oh, yes, good mother, you have,” murmured the weeping girl, in a voice full of tears.  “Your fate has been very like my own—­you, like me, were motherless from your infancy; you, like me, spent your childhood and youth in this very convent school.  Your father, like mine, met his death at the hands of an assassin; your lover, false as mine, abandoned you for a guilty love.  Ah! your sorrows have been very like mine, only much heavier and harder to bear.”  And Salome drew the caressing hands of the abbess to her lips and kissed them over and over again, as she repeated, “Oh, yes, good mother, much heavier and harder to bear than mine.”

“I do not know that, my daughter; but I do know, if I had set myself down a grieving egotist, to brood over my own individual troubles, in a world full of troubles, needing ministrations, I should have lost my reason, if not my soul.”

“But you came back to your convent, as I have come, for refuge,” said Salome.

“Yes, I came here to give my life to the Lord; not in idle, selfish prayers and meditations for my own soul’s sake; no, but in an active, useful life of work.  And I have found deep peace, deep joy.  So will you, my beloved child, if you take the same way.  But you must begin by shutting the doors of your soul against the thoughts of your sorrow, and especially by banishing the image of your false and guilty lover every time it presents itself to your mind.”

“Oh, mother! mother!  I loved him so!  I loved him so!” cried Salome, bursting into a paroxysm of sobs and tears, the first tears she had been able to shed over her awful sorrows.

The abbess was glad to see them; they broke up the fatal apathy as a storm disperses malaria.  She gathered the weeping girl to her bosom, and let her sob and cry there to her heart’s content.

When the gust of grief had spent itself, Salome lifted her head and dried her eyes, murmuring: 

“Yes, I loved him!  I loved him! but it is past! it is past!  I must forget him, henceforth and forever!”

“Yes, daughter, you must forget him, for to remember him would be a grievous sin.  And you must forgive him, though he meditated against you the deepest wrong,” said the abbess, solemnly.

“I will try to forgive the wrong-doer and forget the wrong, but oh! mother, mother, it will be very hard to overlive it!  Oh, I hope, I hope, if it be Heaven’s will, that I shall not have to live very long,” said Salome, with a heavy sigh.

“That is the way I felt in the first bitterness of my sorrow:  but the feeling passed away in duty-doing.  And now, although I know that in the next life every need and aspiration of the soul will be fulfilled, yet I find such peace and joy here, that I am willing, yes and glad, to live in this world as long as my Lord has any work for me to do in his vineyard.”

“Tell me what I ought to do, and I will try to do it,” said Salome, with another deep sigh; for her very breathing was sighing now.