"Not very." And suddenly Miss Carew began to read the great change in
her face. "It has none of it been very good for me, Carey; you have been
quite right. This house and all was a mistake. You have never said it,
but I have seen it in your eyes. And it has not even been in quite good
taste for me to make such a splash--you thought that too. I'm going to
stop it all now, dear, and probably the house will be sold; it's been an
unblest sort of thing."
Miss Carew stared. The tone was so different from any she had ever heard
in Molly's voice; it was very gentle, but exhausted, as if she had been
through an acute crisis in an illness.
"Carey dear, you have always been so kind to me, and I have been very
unkind to you. You will have to know things that will make you hate and
despise me to-morrow. But would you mind giving me one kiss to-night?"
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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