And then with her usual quiet tenderness she undressed the little one, heard her prayers, took her up, and as she rocked, sang a sweet, low evening hymn, that soothed the child to sleep and her own heart to perfect rest.  And early the next morning Marian and little Angel set out by the first coach for Baltimore, on their way to St. Mary’s County.

* * * * *

The Convent of Bethlehem was not only the sanctuary of professed nuns, the school for girls, the nursery of orphans, but it was also the temporary home of those Sisters of Mercy who go forth into the world only on errands of Christian love and charity, and return to their convent often only to die, worn out by toil among scenes and sufferers near which few but themselves would venture.  And as they pass hence to Heaven, their ranks are still filled up from the world—­not always by the weary and disappointed.  Often young Catholic girls voluntarily leave the untried world that is smiling fair before them to enter upon a life of poverty, self-denial and merciful ministrations; so even in this century the order of the Sisters of Mercy is kept up.

Among the most active and zealous of the order of Bethlehem was the Sister Theresa, the youngest of the band.  Youthful as she was, however, this Sister’s heart was no sweet sacrifice of “a flower offered in the bud;” on the contrary, I am afraid that Sister Theresa had trifled with, and pinched, and bruised, and trampled the poor budding heart, until she thought it good for nothing upon earth before she offered it to Heaven.  I fear it was nothing higher than that strange revulsion of feeling, world-weariness, disappointment, disgust, remorse, fanaticism—­either, any, or all of these, call it what you will, that in past ages and Catholic countries have filled monasteries with the whilom, gay, worldly and ambitious; that has sent many a woman in the prime of her beauty and many a man at the acme of his power into a convent; that transformed the mighty Emperor Charles V. into a cowled and shrouded monk; the reckless swashbuckler, Ignatius Loyola, into a holy saint, and the beautiful Louise de la Valliere into an ascetic nun; which finally metamorphosed the gayest, maddest, merriest elf that ever danced in the moonlight into—­Sister Theresa.

Poor Jacquelina! for, of course, you can have no doubt that it is of her we are speaking—­she perpetrated her last lugubrious joke on the day that she was to have made her vows, for when asked what patron saint she would select by taking that saint’s name in religion, she answered—­St. Theresa, because St. Theresa would understand her case the best, having been, like herself, a scamp and a rattle-brain before she took it into her head to astonish her friends by becoming a saint.  Poor Jacko said this with the solemnest face and the most serious earnestness; but, with such a reputation as she had had for pertness, of course nobody would believe but that she was making