Miss Carew was very nervous at this request, but happily all the best side of her was roused by something in Molly that, in spite of a vast difference, recalled the Molly of seven years ago when she had first seen her.  It was a real kiss—­a kind of pact between them.

“I wonder if she will ever wish to do the same again!” thought Molly.

Then Miss Carew left her and she called the maid, who brought at her bidding a long black cloak and a small black toque—­insignificant compared to anything else of Molly’s.

The mistress of Westmoreland House drove away in a hansom, with a bag in her hand, at twenty minutes past seven.

There is a small house with a little chapel attached to it in a road in Chelsea where some Frenchwomen, who were exiled from their own country, have come to dwell.  It is built on Sir Thomas More’s garden, and it possesses within its boundaries the mulberry tree under which the chancellor was sitting when they came to fetch him to the Tower.  It is a poor little house with very poor inmates, and a poor little chapel.  But in that chapel night and day, without a moment’s break, are to be found two figures (when there are not more) dressed in plain brown habits and black veils.  And on the altar there is always a crowd of lighted candles, in spite of the poverty of the chapel.  It is a very small chapel and oddly shaped.  The length of the little building is from north to south, and the altar is to the east.  There are but few benches, but they run the full length of the building.  Strange things are known by these women, who never go farther than the small garden at the back, of the life of the town about them.  Some men and more women get accustomed to coming daily into the chapel with its unceasing exposition, and to love its silence and its atmosphere of rest and peace.  Some never make themselves known; others sometimes ask to see a nun, and thus gradually these recluses come to know memorable secrets in human lives.

Molly had often been there in the weeks which she had afterwards called “my short fit of religious emotion.”  She chose to go there to-night, to spend there her last hour in London.

The little chapel was fairly cool, and through a door very near the altar, open to the garden, came the scent of mignonette on the air.  Besides the motionless figures at the altar-rail there was no one else in the chapel.

At eight o’clock two small brown figures came in and knelt bowed down in the middle of the sanctuary.  The two who had finished their watch rose and knelt by the side of those who relieved guard.  Then the four rose together, and the two newcomers took up their station, and the others left them.  And the incessant oblation of those lives went on.  What a vast moral space lay between their lives and Molly’s!  What a contrast!

Molly had had no home, but they had given up their homes for this.  Molly had pined in vain for human love; they had turned away from it.  Molly had rebelled against all restraints; they had chosen these bonds.  Molly had sinned, against even the world’s code, for love of the world; and they had rejected even the best the world could give.