We--Dr. Small, Brand and I--were dumbfounded by Eileen O’Connor’s passionate outcry. She was utterly unconscious of us and looked only at the Reverend Mother, with a light in her eyes that was more intensely spiritual than I had seen before in any woman’s face. The old nun seemed stricken by Eileen’s words. Into her rugged old face, all wrinkled about the eyes, crept an expression of remorse and shame. Once she raised her hands, slowly, as though beseeching the girl to spare her. Then her hands came down again and clasped each other at her breast, and her head bowed so that her chin was dug into her white bib. Tears came into her eyes and fell unheeded down her withered cheeks. I can see now the picture of us all standing there in the whitewashed corridor of the convent, in the dim light of a hanging lantern--we three officers standing together, the huddled figure of Marthe Nesle lying at our feet, half covered with my trench-coat, but with her face lying sideways, white as death under her cropped red hair, and her bare shoulders stained with a streak of blood; opposite, the old Mother, with bowed head and clasped hands; the two young nuns, rigid, motionless, silent; and Eileen O’Connor, with that queer light on her face, and her hands stretched out with a gesture of passionate appeal. The Reverend Mother raised her head and spoke--after what seemed like a long silence, but was only a second or two, I suppose. “My child, I am an old woman, and have said many prayers. But you have taught me the lesson, which I thought I knew, that the devil does not depart from us until our souls have found eternal peace. I am a wicked old woman, and until you opened my eyes I was forgetful of charity and of our Lord’s most sweet commands.” She turned to us now with an air of wonderful dignity and graciousness. “Gentlemen, I pray you to carry this wounded girl to my own cell. To-night I will sleep on bare boards.” One of the young nuns was weeping bitterly. So we lifted up Marthe Nesle, and, following the Reverend Mother, carried her to a little white room and laid her on an iron bedstead under a picture of the Madonna, below which burned an oil lamp on a wooden table. The American doctor asked Eileen O’Connor to bring him some hot water. Brand and I went back in the car, and I dined at his mess again. XIV Colonel Lavington was discussing the art of the sonnet, and the influence of Italian culture in Elizabethan England. From that subject he travelled to the psychology of courage, which in his opinion, for the moment, was founded on vanity.