It is for you, not for me that we must think."
"No," answered one of the women. "What is our life compared to a
priest's life?"
"Once outside the Abbaye de Chelles, I look upon myself as dead,"
added the nun who had not left the house, while the Sister that had
just returned held out the little box to the priest.
"Here are the wafers . . . but I can hear some one coming up the
stairs."
At this, the three began to listen. The sound ceased.
"Do not be alarmed if somebody tries to come in," said the priest.
"Somebody on whom we could depend was to make all necessary
arrangements for crossing the frontier. He is to come for the letters
that I have written to the Duc de Langeais and the Marquis de
Beauseant, asking them to find some way of taking you out of this
dreadful country, and away from the death or the misery that waits for
you here."
"But are you not going to follow us?" the nuns cried under their
breath, almost despairingly.
"My post is here where the sufferers are," the priest said simply, and
the women said no more, but looked at their guest in reverent
admiration. He turned to the nun with the wafers.
"Sister Marthe," he said, "the messenger will say _Fiat Voluntas_
in answer to the word _Hosanna_."
"There is some one on the stairs!" cried the other nun, opening a
hiding-place contrived in the roof.
This time it was easy to hear, amid the deepest silence, a sound
echoing up the staircase; it was a man's tread on the steps covered
with dried lumps of mud.
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