“Yes, mother, but please don’t ask—just now. Oh, please let me come in! I am so tired! I’ve had such a hard time!” “Of course, my child,” said the Mother, moving to the door and opening it. “You may come in. But what has happened, child? How is it that your cheek is cut, and your hands?” “Mother,” pleaded Madeleine wearily, “must I answer now? I am so unhappy! Can’t I just have my old dress and my bed for to-night—that little bed under the lamp?” “Why, yes, dear, you may have them, of course,” said the nun, tactfully sensing a great grief. “And you need not talk now. I think I know how it is. Come with me.” She led the way along bare, dimly lit corridors and up cold solid iron stairs, echoing to the feet, until once more, as in the old days, the severe but spotless room in which were the baths and the hampers for soiled clothes was reached. “Now, my child,” she said, “you may undress and bathe. I will get something for your eye.” And so here at last, once more, Madeleine put aside the pathetic if showy finery that for a time had adorned and shamed her: a twilled skirt she had only recently bought in the pale hope of interesting _him_, the commonplace little hat for which she had paid ten dollars, the striped shirtwaist, once a pleasure to her in the hope that it would please _him_. In a kind of dumbness of despair she took off her shoes and stockings and, as the Mother left, entered the warm, clean bath which had been provided. She stifled a sob as she did so, and others as she bathed. Then she stepped out and dried her body and covered it with the clean, simple slip of white which had been laid on a chair, brushing her hair and touching her eye, until the Mother Sister returned with an unguent wherewith to dress it. Then she was led along other silent passages, once dreary enough but now healing in their sense of peace and rest, and so into the great room set with row upon row of simple white iron beds, covered with their snowy linen and illuminated only by the minute red lamps or the small candles burning before their idealistic images here and there, beneath which so many like herself were sleeping. Over the bed which she had once occupied, and which by chance was then vacant, burned the one little lamp which she recognized as of old—her lamp, as she had always thought of it—a thin and flickering flame, before an image of the Virgin. At sight of it she repressed a sob. “You see, my child,” said the Mother Superior poetically, “it must have been waiting for you. Anyhow it is empty. Perhaps it may have known you were coming.” She spoke softly so that the long rows of sleepers might not be disturbed, then proceeded to turn down the coverlets. “Oh, Mother,” Madeleine suddenly whispered softly as she stood by the bed, “won’t you let me stay always? I never want to go out any more. I have had such a hard time. I will work so hard for you if you will let me stay!”