He made a gesture with his sword hand towards the convent. “You know what we go into,” he said: “perhaps death--perhaps hideous corruption.” She smiled bravely. “There is no need that a nun should be--desirable.” “You are not afraid?” “No.” “Ah--I saw a man once--who had been a soldier--disfigured.” “I know. I have seen them. I hope it may be me, not you. Ring, Monsieur.” “One moment. We are set apart from the world, you and I, Clémence. We have met many times, very strangely. I think this is going to be the last time.” “The last time,” she echoed. “And you--are afraid?” “Afraid that I may miss death, and live--useless. Afraid of--her--afterwards; afraid--of fear.” He smiled grandly as he spoke. “I am the only person who will ever know that,” she said proudly. He held out his right hand; she put hers into it, and then he cast his hat away, and suddenly clasped her. “Take the last kiss I have to give in this gorgeous world!” she cried. As he kissed her, she sobbed in her throat; and her quick tears wetted his cheek as their lips met the second time. He kissed the ends of her hair, her neck, her hands, the brocade that covered her bosom, then let her free of his embrace, and pulled the long iron chain. As the strident clang of the bell echoed through the convent, he picked up her beaver and gave it her. “You know?” she asked. Her lips were still throbbing, so that she could scarcely speak. “Know?” he murmured unsteadily. “The great--the useless--love I have always had--for you.” The convent door opened. CHAPTER XIV IN THE CONVENT Luc sat in the front room of the gardener’s cottage, looking out on the whitewashed wall of the hospice. He felt utterly weary; the exaltation and the ecstatic visions of the morning had faded. In the next room the dead child lay waiting for her coffin; a sound of sawing wood came harshly from a shed near by. Luc rested his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands; he had taken off his sword, and laid it across the wand-bottomed chair by the window. As he sat motionless, he noticed the pale November sunlight sparkling along the scabbard, the shell, and the quillons. “A useless sword,” he found himself saying. He looked round the room, at the bare walls, the rough furniture, the image of St. Joseph in a corner niche. It seemed to him like a prison cell, though he had often lodged more rudely. The plaster image and the faint stale scent of incense filled him with disgust; he longed for Paris and the great muddy river, or for Aix and his own home. The door that gave on to the garden opened, and Luc rose stiffly to meet the person he expected, the nun the lay sister had promised to send. The Countess had not given him the name of the convent, but he recalled that it was an order of Ursuline sisters. Since his childhood, he had seen them walking in twos through the streets of Aix.