Eleanore sighed deeply, and then quickly smiled again. “Think not that I mourn, my daughter, for having yielded thee up to the Church. May this blessed spirit remain in thee, bringing thee everlasting peace.” Then, while Laure still clung to her, the mother herself put the closely clasped arms away from her neck, and drew the novice to her feet. “Now, my Laure, I must go. But my thoughts are still left with thee.” “But thou wilt come, mother?—In ten days’ time thou wilt come to me again?” “Yea, sith it is permitted by the rules that I see thee once more, I will surely come,” she answered quietly. “Laure will greatly rejoice at thy coming,” said the Prioress, gently, from the doorway. So Eleanore renewed her promise, and shortly after rode away from the priory gate, into the thick wood through which ran the road to Crépuscule. Her mother’s visit brought Laure two days of extremest homesickness and yearning. Then she regained her independence, and began to find a new delight in her surroundings. The perfect peace of it, the infinite, delightful detail of worship, with its multifarious candle-points, and its continual clouds of fragrant incense, all wrought together into a life of undeviating regularity, brought to the novice a sense of peculiar safety and freedom from vexation or care that was quite new to her, for all her youth. The day began with matins, repeated by each nun alone in her cell. Laure had been given a room in a corner of the priory, at the very end of the corridor of novices, and she gained therefrom an added sense of exclusiveness and seclusion. She had not once been late in her answer to the matins bell, and the mistress of novices, passing Laure’s cell on her first round of the day, had never failed to find her praying. Laure came of a pious house, and had known her prayers, all the forms of them, long before she entered the priory. They required no thought in the repetition, and therefore there was many a morning when she played the parrot at her desk, either too sleepy, or too much occupied with thoughts and dreams, to heed the familiar addresses to God. This was not entirely a fault, perhaps. The mornings came very early in these days, and there were wonderful things to be seen through her cell-window. She saw the dawn, golden-girdled, garbed in flowing rose-color, unlock the eastern portals of the sky. She saw stars and moon glimmer faintly and more faint, and finally sink to rest under the high, clear green of the morning heaven. Last of all, over the feathery line of trees that made a horizon for her at her cell-window, she could see the first dazzling ladder of the sun lifted up to lean against the east. And then Laure would long for the murmur of devotion to be stilled in the Abbey, for sun-mists were filling the Heavens, and from the forest the bird-chorus rose to a full-throated _tutti_, in its hymn of glorification to the new day.