A more interesting story than Élise Gautier's is told in our ville. Some
years ago a nun left the Couvent des Augustines in open day, passing out
from the central door in her nun's garb, and meeting there a
foreign-looking man accompanied by a posse of gendarmes. The couple,
followed by a half-hooting, half-cheering mob, drove directly to the
hôtel-de-ville, where they were united in marriage. Then they went away
from our ville, where both were born, to the husband's home in Spain.
When those convent doors had closed upon her, a quarter of a century
before, and the lovers believed themselves eternally separated, she was
a lovely girl of twenty, he a bright youth of twenty-five. She passed
away from his despairing sight, fair and fresh as a spring flower, with
beautiful golden hair and violet eyes; she came out from that fatal
portal a woman of forty-five, stout, spectacled, with faded, thin hair
beneath her nun's cowl, to meet a portly gray-haired man of fifty, in
whom not even love's eye could detect the faintest vestige of the
slender bright-eyed lover of her youth.

The unhappy Laure had been forced to unwilling vows to keep her from
this beggarly lover, and, when he fled to Spain, both became dead to our
ville for long years. Twenty-two years after Laure became Soeur Angelica
it was known in the convent that the machinery of the civil law, which
had only lately forbidden eternal religious vows, had been set in motion
to secure her release; but it remained a mystery who the spring of the
movement was, her parents having long been dead. Soeur Angelica herself
seemed almost more terrified than otherwise at the knowledge, for every
conventual influence was brought to bear upon her morbid conscience to
assure her that eternal damnation follows broken vows. It seems,
however, that amid all her spiritual stress she never confessed, even to
her spiritual director, what desecration had come upon that dovecote by
her constant correspondence with the lover of her youth, now a wealthy