And then I sat down on the stool in the middle of the chamber, and tore into shreds with hands and teeth a new holland overall. Evening began to fall, and the light was dim. My passion had exhausted itself, and I was hungry and tired and miserable. Had any one else except Sister Esmeralda come to the door, I should have behaved differently, for I was a most manageable little creature when not under the influence of the terrible exasperation injustice always provoked in me. But there she stood, after the repeated efforts of the gardener called up to force open my prison door, haughty, contemptuous, and triumphant, with me, poor miserable little me, surrounded by the shreddings of my holland pinafore, in her ruthless power. A blur of light, the anger of madness, the dreadful tense sensation of my helplessness, and before I knew what I had done I had caught up the stool and wildly hurled it at her triumphant visage. Oh, how I hated Sister Esmeralda! how I hated her! The moment was one of exceptional solemnity. I was not scolded, or slapped, or roughly treated. My crime was too appalling for such habitual treatment. One would think I already wore the black shroud of death, that the gallows stood in front of me, and beside it the coffin and the yawning grave, as my enemy, holding my feeble child's hand in a vice, marched me down the corridor into the dormitory, where a lay-sister was commanded to fetch my strong boots, my hat and cloak. The children were going joyously off to supper, with here and there, I can imagine, an awed whisper in my concern, as the lay-sister took my hand in hers; and in silence by her side, in the grey twilight, I walked from the Ivies beyond the common down to the town convent, where only the mothers dwelt. I knew something dreadful was going to happen to me, and being tired of suffering and tired of my short troubled life, I hoped even then that it would prove death. I did not care. It was so long since I had thought it worth while caring! And so I missed the lovely charm of that silent walk through the unaccustomed twilight, with quaint little shops getting ready their evening illumination, and free and happy persons walking to and fro, full of the joy of being, full of the bliss of freedom. My heart was dead to hope, my intelligence, weary from excess of excitement and pain, was dull to novelty. In the town convent I was left awhile in aching solitude in the brown parlour, with its pious pictures and big crucifix. I strained eye and ear through the silent dusk, and was relieved when the superioress--a sort of female pontiff, whom we children saw in reverential stupefaction on scarce feast-days, when she addressed us from such heights as Moses on the mountain might have addressed a group of sparrows--with two other nuns entered. It looked like death, and already the heart within me was dead. I know so well now how I looked: white, blue-veined, blue-lipped, sullen, and indifferent.