and again from the past came suddenly back the text of a sermon preached by Dorward at Green Lanes--_Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow_. It seemed to her that if only she could explain to God that her name was really Snow and that Scarlett was only the name assumed for her by her father, all might even now be well. The somber forms had seized her, and she beat against them with unavailing hands; they snatched her from the bed and wrapped her round and round with something that stifled her cries; with her last breath she tried to shriek a warning to Carrier of the existence of hell, to beg him to put away his little red devils lest he, when he should ultimately fall from the sky, should fall as deep as hell. Sylvia came out of her delirium to find herself in the ward of a hospital kept by French nuns; she asked what had been the matter with her, and, smiling compassionately, they said it was a bad fever. She lay for a fortnight in a state of utter lassitude, watching the nuns going about their work as she would have watched birds in the cool deeps of a forest. The lassitude was not unpleasant; it was a fatigue so intense that her spirit seemed able to leave her tired body and float about among the shadows of this long room. She knew that there were other patients in the ward, but she had no inclination to know who they were or what they looked like; she had no desire to communicate with the outside world, nor any anxiety about the future. She could not imagine that she should ever wish to do anything except lie here watching the nuns at their work like birds in the cool deeps of a forest. When the doctor visited her and spoke cheerfully, she wondered vaguely how he managed to keep his very long black beard so frizzy, but she was not sufficiently interested to ask him. To his questions about her bodily welfare she let her tired body answer automatically, and often, when the doctor was bending over to listen to her heart or lungs, her spirit would have mounted up to float upon the shadows of sunlight rippling over the ceiling, that he and her body might commune without disturbing herself. At last there came a morning when the body grew impatient at being left behind and when it trembled with a faint desire to follow the spirit. Sylvia raised herself up on her elbow and asked a nun to bring her a looking-glass. "But all my hair has been cut!" she exclaimed. She looked at her eyes: there was not much life in them, yet they were larger than she had ever seen them, and she liked them better than before, because they were now very kind eyes: this new Sylvia appealed to her. She put the glass down and asked if she had been very ill. "Very ill indeed," said the nun. Sylvia longed to tell the nun that she must not believe all she had said when she was delirious: and then she wondered what she had said. "Was I very violent in my delirium?" she asked. The nun smiled.