of Narcisse. She had received Eustacie on her first return with
great joy, and had always treated her with much indulgence, and
when the drooping,
broken-hearted girl came back once more to the shelter of her
convent, the good-humoured Abbess only wished to make her happy
again.

But Eustacie's misery was far beyond the ken of her aunt, and the
jovial turn of these consolations did but deepen her agony. To be
congratulated on her release from the heretic, assured of future
happiness with her cousin, and, above all, to hear Berenger abused
with all the bitterness of rival family and rival religion, tore up
the lacerated spirit. Ill, dejected, and broken down, too subdued
to fire up in defence, and only longing for the power of indulging
in silent grief, Eustacie had shrunk from her, and wrapped herself
up in the ceaseless round of masses and prayers, in which she was
allowed to perceive a glimmering of hope for her husband's soul.
The Abbess, ever busy with affairs of her convent or matters of
pleasure, soon relinquished the vain attempt to console where she
could not sympathize, trusted that the fever of devotion would wear
itself out, and left her niece to herself. Of the seven nuns, two
were decorously gay, like their Mother Abbess; one was a prodigious
worker of tapestry, two were unrivalled save by one another as
confectioners. Eustacie had been their pet in her younger days;
now she was out of their reach, they tried in turn to comfort her;
and when she would not be comforted, they, too, felt aggrieved by
the presence of one whose austerity reproached their own laxity;
they resented her disappointment at Soeur Monique's having been
transferred to Lucon, and they, too, left her to the only persons
whose presence she had ever seemed to relish,--namely, her maid