'Oh, yes, papa; it is so quiet there, even amid our little troubles,' said she, as he left her, when the Beguinage gates were closed for the evening; 'and all I want is peace and rest--peace and rest.' 'Shall you ever get them in this world?' asked Sister Lisette. Alison regarded her wistfully, and said, 'Why not? Can you have led a stormy life?' 'Far from it. My life in the world was a happy one till one dire calamity fell upon me, and drove me to find peace for ever here; but how true it is "that it is vain to try to knit up the present with the past; each part of our lives has its own pleasures and hopes." But now my pleasure is to do good--my only hope to die soon and well.' 'And the calamity to which you refer?' asked Alison, softly, while greatly interested by the singularly sweet and subdued manner of the young Beguine. 'Was the death of my dear, dear husband,' replied the sister; and so, while she sat stitching away at the shining garment, resplendent with gold--a priest's vestment--for old Père Leopold of the Church of St. André, she told Alison some of her experiences in life, and amid them, curious to relate, there occurred repeatedly a name with which the reader is already familiar. Alison had a sweetly sympathetic way with her, and her namesake was seized by one of the unaccountable fits of confidence that, come to most of us at times to speak about herself, and tell the story of her own sorrows. CHAPTER IV. A YEAR OF JOY. A very simple circumstance--an occasion of every-day life--a railway journey, brought about the awful tragedy in her life, by which she was left a widow at twenty, after being wedded a year--which she called a year of joy, left without a near relation in the world but her brother, Victor Gabion, a captain of Artillery, who, strange to say, was the source of all her sorrow. 'After leaving the English convent at Bruges, I returned to the house of my guardian, M. Hoboken, a merchant in the Avenue du Commerce here. My parents were dead; I had but one brother, Victor Gabion, to whose brother officer Lucien I had been betrothed by them, and whom I had known from his early boyhood, when we had been playmates together, and before we came to those restrictions in intercourse peculiar to French and Belgian society in later years. 'We had learned to love each other very much, Lucien and I, though now we could only see each other at given times, and always in presence of a third party; and each time I seemed to discover some fresh trait in his disposition which rendered him more worthy of love and more worthy of the tenderest affection. 'He was so handsome, my Lucien, so kind, so tender; and so good, so religious and true! He had that dark southern beauty which makes a man so attractive to a fair woman, and, moreover, he possessed that charm which is more attractive and dangerous still--he was interesting.'