As
for me, I have nothing to do with it--nothing; but I cannot
have you make yourself ill with chattering; so now let me put
your pillow straight, and then you must go to sleep as fast as
you can."
With a final shake of the pillow and arrangement of the bed-
clothes, Soeur Lucie went away, leaving Madelon, not to sleep,
but to lie broad awake, framing the most dismal little
pictures of the future. And was this to be the end of it all,
then?--the end of her vague dreams, her undefined hopes, which,
leaping over a dim space of intervening years, had rested on a
future of indefinite brightness lying somewhere outside these
convent walls? Ah, was all indeed at an end? Never to pass
these dull walls again, never to see anything but these dreary
rooms,--all her life to be one unvarying, relentless routine,
day after day, year after year--to be forced to teach stupid
children, like Soeur Ursule, or to make jam and embroider
alter-cloths, like Soeur Lucie, to say such long prayers, and
to wear such ugly dresses, thinks poor Madelon, with a queer
jumble of the duties and obligations of a nun's life.
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