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Before any sound had reached the watcher, who was sleeping in the grated cell which opened into the dormitory, the wall had, been pierced, the chimney scaled, the iron grating which barred the upper orifice of the flue forced, and the two redoubtable ruffians were on the roof. The wind and rain redoubled, the roof was slippery. "What a good night to leg it!" said Brujon.
Moreover, "they watch the hygiene of the city by clearing the nest of its dead and ridding the larvae of the wasps of their excretory products." Plunging successively into each chamber of the dormitory the forepart of their bodies, "they provoke the emission of that fluid excrement of which the larvae, owing to their cloistration, contain an extreme reserve."
And there were bound to be biscuits on the sideboard in Wain's dining-room. He crept quietly out of the dormitory. He had been long enough in the house to know the way, in spite of the fact that all was darkness.
I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted, locked upper-chambers, and a most ghostly garret, with the "Devil's footsteps" in the fields behind the house, and in front of it the patched dormitory where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them was an idiot from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned for his ascetic sanctity.
It was perfectly appalling; even his comrades those who had shared with him in the dreadful deeds about which he raved found the scene too trying for their hardened and blunted feelings; and such of them as had their hammocks slung in the same dormitory abandoned them and slept in the open air rather than remain to have their souls harrowed by his dreadful utterances.
The four boys did not return to the dormitory but, after they had washed, strolled about in the playground. There was quite a ferment, in the dormitory, when their absence was perceived, and the others noticed the four made-up figures in their place.
Nobody thought of laughing at Sister Gabrielle, who went upstairs slowly, saying "Hush, hush," all the time, without making the noise any less. The servant in the little dormitory was crying too. She shook me a little while she was undressing me and said, "I'm sure you are pleased at having that Sister Marie-Aimée of yours." We used to call the servant Bonne Esther.
I awoke with a sort of start; the rain was dashing against the panes, and the wind uttering a peevish cry at intervals; the night-lamp was dying on the black circular stand in the middle of the dormitory: day had already broken. How I pity those whom mental pain stuns instead of rousing! This morning the pang of waking snatched me out of bed like a hand with a giant's gripe.
"Of course not!" declared Helen, with added emphasis. Then Ruth crept into her own bed and lay looking at the whiter patch of the nearest window long after Helen's gentle, regular breathing announced her chum asleep. There were few other sounds about the dormitory. A door shut softly in the distance. Somewhere a dog barked once. Ruth was not sleepy at all.
It was from the older girls in the dormitory, in whispered talks we had at night after we were in bed, that I learned this and innumerable other things, which my own observation during the weeks that followed served to confirm.
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