Graham was confounded by her vehemence.  What argument had he to oppose to this torrent of bitter words?  Or how reason with such a woman as this—­one with a show of right, too, on her side, as he was bound to own?  He did not attempt it, but gave up the point at once, turning to a more practical consideration.

“If you are not disposed to take charge of your little niece, Madame,” he said, “can you at least suggest any one in whose care she can be left?  I promised her father to place her in your hands, but you must see it is impossible for me to take any further responsibility on myself.  Even if I had the will, I have not at present the power.”

“I never said I would not take charge of my niece, Monsieur,” said the Superior.

And to what end then, wonders Graham, this grand tirade, this fine display of what to him could not but appear very like hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness?  To what end indeed?  And yet, perhaps, not wholly unnatural.  After five-and-twenty years of convent life, Therese Linders still clung to the memory of the closing scenes of her worldly career, as the most eventful in the dead level of a grey monotonous life, still held to the remembrance of her mother’s death, and of her fierce quarrel with her brother, as the period when all her keenest emotions had been most actively called into play.  And indeed what memories are so precious to us, which, in our profound egotism, do we cherish so closely, as those of the times which stirred our strongest passions to their depth, and which, gathering up, as it were, all lesser experiences into one supreme moment, revealed to us the intensest life of which we are capable?  There are women who would willingly barter months of placid existence for one such moment, though it be a bitter one; and though Mademoiselle Linders was not one of these, or she would never have discovered that her vocation lay within the walls of a convent, she was, nevertheless, a woman capable of strong feelings, of vehement passions; and these had, perhaps, found their widest scope in the love, though it had been a wayward one, that she had felt for her mother, and in her intense jealousy of her brother.  For a quarter of a century these passions had lain dormant, crushed beneath the slow routine of daily duties; but these, in their unvarying monotony, had, on the other hand, made that lapse of years appear but as a few weeks, and kept the memory of those stormy scenes fresher than that of the events that, one by one, had crept into the convent life, and slowly modified its dull course.  The news of her brother’s death had affected her but little; but the sight of the familiar handwriting, the very framing of the sentences and choice of words, which had seemed to her like a fresh challenge even from his grave, had revived a thousand passions, jealousies, enmities, which one might have thought dead and buried for ever.  What ghosts from old years that Graham could not see,