ce."
Mademoiselle Bouchard was tall, blooming, with the prettiest little rosy face in the world. M. de Quelen smiled and said, "What, my dear child, a day''s leave of absence!
Three days if you like.
I grant you three days." The prioress could do nothing; the archbishop had spoken. Horror of the convent, but joy of the pupil.
The effect may be imagined.
This stern cloister was not so well walled off, however, but that the life of the passions of the outside world, drama, and even romance, did not make their way in.
To prove this, we will confine ourselves to recording here and to briefly mentioning a real and incontestable fact, which, however, bears no reference in itself to, and is not connected by any thread whatever with the story which we are relating.
We mention the fact for the sake of completing the physiognomy of the convent in the reader''s mind.
About this time there was in the convent a mysterious person who was not a nun, who was treated with great respect, and who was addressed as Madame Albertine.
Nothing was known about her, save that she was mad, and that in the world she passed for dead. Beneath this history it was said there lay the arrangements of fortune necessary for a great marriage.
This woman, hardly thirty years of age, of dark complexion and tolerably pretty, had a vague look in her large black eyes. Could she see?