Yet behind that closed door it was an old, old woman who dragged herself to it and shot the bolt. It had taken all her self-control not to scream at Sister De Sales to be silent with her foolish talk about a doctor. She would have no doctor to speak learnedly to the next in rank of an overworked body and a troubled mind. “I won’t have any doctor,” she said to herself, as she sank on her hard chair again. “I’m not dying--not yet! I can’t die,” she whispered with a shudder. “I should see them all standing round my coffin, I should hear their astonishment. Sister De Sales, who thinks I am a saint; Father Maurice, the new chaplain, almost crying because I had withheld my sins from him in the confessional.” Her face grew strong again as she thought where they would bury her--in unconsecrated ground. She was a clever woman; she knew even in her wretchedness now that of all the convent not one nun had a personal ambition but herself. She had felt the gentle piety round her stifling often enough, though she had managed never to show it. There had been reasons for her to leave the world, but even here in seclusion she had worked and strained for the power she had reached--worked half for safety, that there might be no one over her, half to find peace for her miserable mind. Well, she had had her way! She ruled the convent as no one before her had ever done. The community had never been so rich, so respected; the nuns, if they did not love her, held her in awe for her saintly austerity, her ceaseless industry--and here was what it had all come to. Every one of those good and gentle women, who were saints, indeed, would shrink from the holy mother raised above them if her secret history were revealed. Alive, she would be excommunicated; dead, she writhed in her chair as she thought of the hushed astonishment, the shocked amazement of the little world she ruled. “No, no, no!” she said to herself. “As I have lived I will die and be buried; no one shall ever know. But I can’t die yet.” She stretched out her hand for the wine she had refused, and drank it eagerly. No woman in the world had lived a harder, more self-denying life than she. Was it all to count for nothing now, just for the want of a little resource, a little more courage? “No one shall know,” she said again, as the wine brought some warmth to her slow blood. As she lifted her eyes they caught the inscription of a picture on the wall. “‘Death and the Judgment.’” The words struck her like an actual blow, but she never lowered her startled eyes. What she had done she had done. She was willing to bear the brunt of it, but not the shame of humiliation before the nuns, who revered her in their pure and gentle hearts. “‘Death and the Judgment,’” she thought, but she dared not say it aloud, when, for all she knew, Death might be at her very elbow, and for the Judgment she was unprepared.