"
Then he told me.
I was to marry the young Lord Raa!
I was stunned. It was just as if the power of thought had been smitten
out of me.
TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER
That night, and during the greater part of the following day, I felt,
without quite knowing why, as if I were living under the dark cloud of a
gathering thunderstorm. All my fear of the world, and my desire to
escape from it, had fallen upon me afresh. Hence it was not altogether
by the blind leading of fate that half an hour before Ave Maria I
entered the church of the Convent which the Reverend Mother had given me
the name of.
The church was empty when I pushed past the leather hanging that covered
the door, but the sacristan was lighting the candles for Benediction, so
I went up to the bronze screen, the Cancello, that divides the public
part from the part occupied by the Sisters, and knelt on the nearest
step.
After a while the church-bell rang overhead, and then (the congregation
having gathered in the meantime) the nuns came in by way of a corridor
which seemed to issue out of the darkness from under a figure of the
Virgin and Child.
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