United States or American Samoa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The resemblance between Emily and her unfortunate aunt had frequently been observed by Laurentini, and had occasioned the singular behaviour, which had formerly alarmed her; but it was in the nun's dying hour, when her conscience gave her perpetually the idea of the Marchioness, that she became more sensible, than ever, of this likeness, and, in her phrensy, deemed it no resemblance of the person she had injured, but the original herself.
The loose sleeve of thin black serge flowed away from the strong, finely moulded wrist; the white starched guimpe showed snowy between the drooping folds of the nun's veil.... These familiar things Lynette drank in with a sense of unspeakable content and pleasure. Then her eyes opened widely, and she knew.
But in a moment, Trevalyon is beside her, whose arm she quietly takes, while he led her up the long drawing rooms, the cynosure of all eyes, giving her at the head of the room, an easy chair. At the first sound of the voice of the nun, Delrose had started violently, muttering, "By thunder, her voice, but no! not from behind a nun's veil."
Poor little ones!" and the set lines of the nun's stern face softened into tenderness as she spoke. "We do our best to make them happy, but naturally they feel lonely. We have generally fifty or sixty young girls here, besides the day scholars." "A great responsibility," I remarked. "Very great indeed!" and she sighed; "almost terrible.
Indeed, almost every occurrence a boy's success at school, an advocate's triumphal passage of the perils of examination at Padua, a priest's first mass, a nun's novitiate, a birth, an amputation is the subject of tuneful effusion, and no less the occasion of a visit from the facchini of the neighboring campo, who assemble with blare of trumpets and tumult of voices around the victim's door, and proclaim his skill or good fortune, and break into vivas that never end till he bribes their enthusiasm into silence.
Francesca was insulted in her career of mercy through the streets of Rome, when civil war and anarchy were raging there in the wildest epoch of lawless strife and fiercest passion; and the gentle sisters of the poor, the servants of the helpless, who have abandoned home and friends and comforts, and, above all, respectability, that idol of the English mind, that wretched counterfeit of virtue, for the love which they bear to Christ in His suffering members, have been insulted and beaten in the streets of London in the face of day, and only because of the habit they wore, the badge of no common vocation, the nun's black dress, the livery of the poor.
While wavering between the duty which, as a physician, she owed the sufferer and the impulse not to refuse the request of a dying woman, she read in old Nun's eyes an entreaty to obey Kasana's wish, and with drooping head left the tent.
There was a white China silk, with belt and shoulder-knots of black velvet; a white Japanese crepe, with purple lilacs strewed over its surface, and frills of violet ribbon for ornament; a Christmas dress of soft, white camel's hair, with bands of white-fox fur round the slightly pointed neck and elbow-sleeves; and, last of all, a Quaker gown of silver-gray nun's cloth, with a surplice and full undersleeves of white crêpe-lisse.
I bore her to a cave at a short distance from where we landed; and, wrapping her up in a cloak which I had saved from the boat, took away her nun's attire, and exposed it to dry in the powerful rays of the sun. I went in search of food, which I soon obtained: banana and cocoa-nuts grew in profusion and in beauty, and fresh water ran down in noisy rills.
It could never have uttered the burning passion of a lover for his mistress; the nightingale could have found no thorn on it to press his aching poet's heart against; but sick and weary eyes had dwelt gratefully upon it; at most it might have expressed, like a prayer, the nun's stainless love of some favorite saint in paradise.
Word Of The Day