"No, please!" begged Greta, flinching from the torture.
But the English girl was pitiless. She checked the letters off upon her fingers:
The cell was a large, light, airy room on the first-floor of the big two-storied Convent building that stood in its spacious, tree-shaded, high-fenced gardens beyond the Hospital at the north end of the town. Tall stained-wood presses full of papers and account-files covered the wall upon one side. There also stood a great iron safe, with heavy ledgers piled upon it. Upon the other three sides of the room were bookshelves, doubly and trebly laden, with Latin tomes of the Fathers of the Church, and the works and writings of modern theologians, many of them categorised upon the "Index Expurgatorius." Rows there were of English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish classical authors, and many volumes of recently-published scientific works. It might have been the room of a business man who was at the same time a priest and a scholar. There were roller maps upon the walls, and two or three engravings, Bougereau's "Virgin of Consolation," the "Madonna dei Ansidei" of Raffaelle, and a "Crucifixion" over the chimneypiece, which had three little statuettes in tinted alabaster--a St. Ignatius at one end, a St. Anthony of Padua at the other; in the middle, the Virgin bearing the Child.
The Mother-Superior sat writing at a bare solid deal table of the kitchen kind, with stained legs to add to its ugliness, and stained black-knobbed fronts to the drawers in it. Her pen flew over the paper.
Seated though she was, you could see her to be of noble figure, tall and finely proportioned. The habit of the nun does not hide everything that makes for beauty and for grace. The pure outlines of the small, perfectly-shaped head showed through the thin black veil that fell over the white starched coif. The small, high-instepped foot could not be hidden in walking; the make of the thick shoe might not disguise its form. The delicate whiteness and smooth, supple beauty of her hands, larger than the hands of ordinary women, their owner being of more heroic build, as of ampler mind and keener intellect, betrayed her to be a woman not yet old, though there were some deep lines and many fine ones on the attentive face that bent over the large square sheet of paper.