confession anymore, and she would not take holy communion. She used to go to mass because she sang there, and she was fond of music. I often stopped with her and consoled her. She explained to me that marriage meant love. Sister Marie-Aimee, who had not been well for some time, became quite ill. Madeleine nursed her devotedly and treated us dreadfully badly. She was particularly unkind to me, and when she saw me tired of sewing she would say, trying to turn her nose up, "If mademoiselle objects to sewing, she had better take a broom and sweep." One Sunday she hit upon the idea of making me clean the stairs during mass. It was January. A damp cold which came up from the passages climbed the steps and got under my dress. I swept as hard as I could to keep warm. The sound of the harmonium came from the chapel out to me. From time to time I recognized Madeleine's thin piercing tones, and M. le Cure's jerky notes. I could follow mass by the singing. All of a sudden Colette's voice rose above all the others. It was strong and pure. It broadened, drowned the sound of the harmonium, drowned everything else, and then seemed to fly away over the linden trees, over the house, and over the church spire itself. It made me tremble, and when the voice came down to earth, trembling a little as it went back into the church and was swept up by the sound of the harmonium again, I began to cry, sobbing as though I were quite a little girl. Then Madeleine's sharp voice pierced through the others once more, and I swept and swept hard as though my broom could scratch out the voice which was so disagreeable to me. That was the day Sister Marie-Aimee called me to her. She had been up in her room for two months. She was a little better, but I noticed that her eyes did not shine at all. They made me think of a rainbow which had almost melted away. She made me tell her funny little stories about what had been going on, and she tried to smile while she was listening to me, but her lips only smiled on one side of her mouth. She asked me if I had heard her screaming. "Oh yes," I said, I had heard her during her illness. She had screamed so dreadfully in the middle of the night that the whole dormitory had been kept awake. Madeleine was coming and going. We heard her splashing water about, and when I asked her what was the matter with Sister Marie-Aimee, she said, as she hurried past, that she had rheumatism. I remembered at once that Bonne Justine used to have rheumatism too, but she had never screamed like that, and I remember wondering whether poor Sister Marie-Aimee's legs were swollen to three times their size, like those of Bonne Justine. Her cries got worse and worse. One of them was so terrible that it seemed to come right out of her vitals. Then we had heard her moaning, and that was all. A few moments afterwards