As soon as she had gone I dragged Sister Marie-Aimee off to the old bench. She stopped a moment, and before sitting down she said, "It is as though things were waiting for us." She sat down. She leaned against the linden tree, and I kneeled down in the grass at her feet. There were no more rays in her eyes. It was as though the colours in them had all been mixed up together. Her dear little face had grown smaller, and seemed to have gone further back into her cap. Her stomacher had not the beautiful curve on her chest that it used to have, and her hands were so thin that the blue veins in them showed up quite clearly. She hardly glanced at the window of her room, but looked out on the linden trees and round the courtyard, and as she caught sight of the Mother Superior's house, these words fell from her like a sigh, "We must forgive others if we wish to be forgiven." Then she looked at me again, and said, "Your eyes are sad." She passed the palms of her hands over my eyes, as if she wanted to wipe out something which displeased her, and, keeping them there so that my eyes remained shut, "How we suffer,"' she said. Then she took her hands away and clasped mine, and, with her eyes on my face, she said, as though she were praying, "My sweet daughter, listen to me. Never become a poor religious." She heaved a long sigh of regret, and said, "Our dress of black and white tells others that we are creatures of strength and of brightness. At our bidding all tears are dried, and all who suffer come to us for consolation, but nobody thinks of our own suffering. We are like women without faces." Then she spoke of the future. She said, "I am going where the missionaries go. I shall live there in a house full of terror. Before my eyes will pass unceasingly everything that is hideous, everything that is ugly, everything that is bad." I listened to her deep voice. There was a note of passion in it. It was as though she were taking on to her own shoulders all the suffering of the world. Her fingers loosed mine. She passed them over my cheeks, and in a gentle voice, and sweet, she said, "The purity of your face will always remain graven on my mind." Then she looked out, away and past me, and added, "God has given us remembrance, and it is not in anybody's power to take that away from us." She got up from the bench. I went with her across the yard, and when Ox Eye had closed the heavy gate behind her, I stood and listened to the echo of its closing. That evening Sister Desiree-des-Anges came into the room later than usual. She had been taking part in special prayer for Sister Marie-Aimee, who was going away to nurse the lepers.