had longed for expansion--ideas she could not formulate, desires
she could not express, crowded, jostled in her brain. She wanted a
wider outlook on life than the narrow convent windows offered.
Brief excursions into the world to the homes of her friends had
filled her with a yearning for freedom and for independence, for a
greater range of thought and action. Her artistic studies had
served to foster an unrest she struggled against bravely and to
conceal which she became daily more self-contained. Her reserve
was like a barrier about her. She was sweet and gentle to all
around her, but a little aloof and very silent. To the other girls
she had been a heroine of romance, puzzling mystery surrounded
her; to the Nuns an enigma. The Mother Superior, alone, had
arrived at a partial understanding, more than that even she could
not accomplish. Gillian loved her, but her reserve was stronger
than her love. Sitting now in the dainty English bedroom,
revelling in the warm beauty of the exquisite landscape that,
mellowed in the evening light, lay spread out beneath her eyes,
Gillian thought a little sadly of her parting with the Reverend
Mother. She had tried to hide the happiness that the strange
feeling of freedom gave her, to smother any look or word that
might wound the gentle sensibility of the frail robed woman whose
eyes were sad at the approaching separation. Her conscience smote
her that her own heart held no sadness. She had said very little,
nothing of the new life that lay ahead of her. She hid her hopes
of the future as jealously as she had hidden her longings in the
past, and she had left the convent as silently as she had lived in
it. She had driven back to the hotel with a sense of relief
predominating that it was all over, breathing deeply with a sigh
of relaxed tension. It seemed to her then as if she had learned to
breathe only within the last few days, as if the air itself was