Like
the flow of a full stream in the still moonlight, she sang her
canticle of praise to the guardian of the house, before she retired
to rest:
"Ave, Joseph! Fili David juste!
Vir Mariae de qua natus est Jesus!"
Lady de Tilly sat listening as she held the hands of her two nieces,
thinking how merciless was Fate, and half rebelling in her mind
against the working of Providence. The sweet song of Mere St.
Borgia fell like soft rain upon her hard thoughts, and instilled a
spirit of resignation amid the darkness, as she repeated the words,
"Ave, Joseph!" She fought bitterly in her soul against giving up
her two lambs, as she called them, to the cold, scant life of the
cloister, while her judgment saw but too plainly that naught else
seemed left to their crushed and broken spirits. But she neither
suggested their withdrawal from the Convent, nor encouraged them to
remain.
In her secret thought, the Lady de Tilly regarded the cloister as a
blessed refuge for the broken-hearted, a rest for the weary and
overladen with earthly troubles, a living grave, which such may
covet and not sin; but the young, the joyous, the beautiful, and all
capable of making the world fairer and better, she would inexorably
shut out.
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