The convent was neither very large nor very wealthy.  The building itself had formerly been a chateau-farm, which, with its sheds and outlying buildings, had, many years ago, been converted with considerable alterations into its present form; rooms had been partitioned off, a little chapel had been built, the hall turned into a refectory, the farmyard and orchard into a pleasant sunny garden with lawn, and flower-beds, and shrubs, with vines and fruit-trees alternating with creepers along the old walls.  As for the sisters, few were from the upper ranks of society, belonging for the most part, rather to the middle and bourgeois class.  Mademoiselle Linders had gained her present position not less by her superior birth and education, than by that to which she would more willingly have attributed her elevation—­a certain asceticism of life which she affected, an extra observance of fasts and vigils, which the good nuns looked upon with reverence, without caring to emulate such peculiar sanctity in their own persons.  The rule was not a strict one, nor, though the Superior was careful to enforce it to its utmost rigour, was the life one of particular hardship or privation.  They were a simple, kind, good-hearted set, these Sisters, having their little disputes, and contentions, and jealousies among themselves occasionally, no doubt, but leading good, peaceable lives on the whole, with each day and hour well filled with its appointed tasks, leading through a continual, not useless round of embroidery, teaching, compote-making, and prayers.

Perhaps some one looking round on them, with their honest, homely Belgian faces, would have tried to imagine some history for them, in accordance with the traditions that cling about convent walls, and associate themselves with the very mention of a nun; and most likely they would have been all wrong.  None of these Sisters had had very eventful lives, and they had, for the most part, dropped into their present mode of existence quite naturally.  With little romance to look back upon, save such as finds a place in even the homeliest life, with an imperfect middle-class education that had failed to elevate the mind, or give it wide conceptions of life, and religion, and duty, a certain satisfaction at having done with secular life and its cares, and at having their future here and hereafter comfortably provided for, was perhaps the general tone amongst this prosaic, unimaginative community.  We are, indeed, far from affirming that in that little society there was no higher tone of religious enthusiasm, that there were not some who not only found their highest religious ideal in the life they had chosen, but to whom it formed, in fact, the highest ideal to which they could attain, and calculated, therefore, to develope in them the best and noblest part of their natures.  To such, the appointed, monotonous round, the unquestioning submission to the will of another, the obedience at once voluntary and enforced, would not only bring a