The rain lashed the earth; the wind roared around the house,
and filled it with unusual noises. The cold was a torture
that few found themselves able to endure. But it brought a
compensation. Fray Ignatius did not leave the Mission
comforts; and Rachela could not bear to go prowling about the
corridors and passages. She established herself in the
Senora's room, and remained there. And very early in the
evening she said "she had an outrageous headache," and went to
her room.
Then Antonia and Isabel sat awhile by their mother's bed.
They talked in whispers of their father and brothers, and when
the Senora cried, they kissed her sobs into silence and wiped
her tears away. In that hour, if Fray Ignatius had known it,
they undid, in a great measure, the work to which he had given
more than a month of patient and deeply-reflective labor. For
with the girls, there was the wondrous charm of love and
nature; but with the priest, only a splendid ideal of a Church
universal that was to swallow up all the claims of love and
all the ties of nature.
It was nearly nine o'clock when Antonia and Isabel returned to
the parlor fire. Their hearts were full of sorrow for
their mother, and of fears for their own future. For this
confidence had shown them how firmly the refuge of the convent
had been planted in the anxious ideas of the Senora.
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