Mother Felicitas sat in her straight-backed chair in her own parlor and gripped the table in front of her, as if only by holding fast to something could she keep from drifting out on the great sea of death. She had not been herself since that strange disappearance of Beryl Corselas. A constant, agonized fear that ate at her heart had made even her agonized nerves give way, her step that had been noiseless, heavy and uncertain, her pale skin like parchment stretched over bone. And this morning she had heard that which wrung a cry from her stiff lips, though she was not alone to bear her terror. “Dear mother, what is it?” cried Sister De Sales, flurriedly rising. “You are ill--suffering?” For the reverend mother’s face was more grayish-white than the whitewashed plaster of the parlor walls. Mother Felicitas nodded speechlessly. But for all that sudden pang at her heart, she moved her hand jerkily, so that it covered an open letter on the table. “Water--a faintness!” she managed to say. But when Sister De Sales got back with water and wine the reverend mother was lying back in her chair. The sister was a simple soul, and saw only that the Mother Superior’s ill turn was over; not--what the dead Mother Benedicta would have seen--that a certain pale-blue, gold-embossed note that had been conspicuous enough among a batch of business-letters had disappeared from sight. It was the day for going over the week’s accounts, and Sister De Sales was wont to dread it, in spite of possessing a good head for figures, so sharp were the reverend mother’s sunken eyes and so keen her instant detection of a penny out in the balance-sheet. But to-day she would willingly have seen her books all proved wrong if only the superior could have strength to do it. “You are not well, dear mother; you would see the doctor if I sent for him?” she said timidly, looking at the gray pallor of the hard face. Mother Felicitas roused herself. “No, sister, no!” she said, with a sort of panic, and forced her manner to its old authority. “It is nothing. I am not so young as I was, and I forget it, perhaps. But we will leave the accounts till to-morrow. I--I will rest now.” She made no demur as the anxious sister placed a stool under her feet, but at the gentle coaxing to drink some wine she frowned harshly. “No, no! Go,” she said, “and let me rest. Those things, as I said, can wait.” Sister De Sales withdrew, softly, aghast. Never in all her convent-life had she known any duty postponed “till to-morrow.” The reverend mother must be very ill, indeed. She would see Sister Agnes; between them they might make Mother Felicitas see reason and a doctor. The excuse for her sudden faintness was but the unselfish desire to spare others pain. “Not so young as I was,” she had said, and Sister De Sales, stout and forty-five, knew that she was the elder of the two by a year or more.