"How much have you got?" I asked her curtly. The complicated emotions through which I had passed had left me in a savage humour; and the peculiar infelicity of this proposal might have irritated St. Aloysius himself. We were not allowed the possession of our own money, though in view of the fact that there was ordinarily nothing to buy with it, extravagance would have been impossible. Every Thursday afternoon the "Bazaar" was opened; our purses, carefully marked with name and number, were handed to us, and we were at liberty to purchase such uninteresting necessities as writing-paper, stamps, blank-books, pencils, and sewing materials. The sole concession to prodigality was a little pile of pious pictures,--small French prints, ornamented with lace paper, which it was our custom to give one another upon birthdays and other festive occasions. They were a great resource in church, where prayer-books, copiously interleaved with these works of art, were passed to and fro for mutual solace and refreshment. All these things were as well known to Annie as to me, but she was too absorbed in her grief to remember them. She mopped her eyes, and said vacantly that she thought she had a dollar and a half. "I have seventy-five cents," I said; "and Elizabeth hasn't anything. She spent all her money last Thursday. We might be able to raise five dollars amongst us. If you think that much would be of any use to Marianus, all you have to do is to ask Madame Bouron for our purses, and for his address, and see if she would mind our writing and sending it to him." Annie, impervious at all times to sarcasm, looked dazed for a moment, her wet blue eyes raised piteously to mine. "Then you think we couldn't manage it?" she asked falteringly. But I plunged my face into my wash-basin, as a hint that the conversation was at an end. I, too, needed the relief of tears, and was waiting impatiently to be alone. For Marianus had gone. Of that, at least, there was no shadow of doubt. We should never see him again; and life seemed to stretch before me in endless grey reaches of grammar, and arithmetic, and French conversation; of getting up early in the morning, uncheered by the thought of seeing Marianus serve Mass; of going to bed at night, with never another glance at that dark shadow in the moonlight. I felt that for me the page of love was turned forever, the one romance of my life was past. I cried softly and miserably into my pillow; and resolved, as I did so, that the next morning I would write on the fly-leaves of my new French prayer-book and my "Thomas à Kempis" the lines:-- "'Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all." The Convent Stage "From this hour I do renounce the creed whose fatal worship of bad passions has led thee on, step by step, to this blood-guiltiness!"