The Argosy — page 134: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A Romance of the Cloister. 11g. II, THE night was calm and beautiful, yet a superstitious mind might have read evil augury in the heavy clouds veiling the moon from time to time, their dense, purply black masses so strangely contrasted with the piercing, silvery radiance. Never was moonlight more brilliant, never shadows more gloomy. Bodeful, too, sounded the shrill cries of the night owl flitting from tree to tree and the melancholy splash of the stream watering the convent gardens, now much swollen with spring rains. Nature seemed in a sobbing, waiting mood ; even the breeze stirring the pine leaves sounded like a human sigh. Between the outhouses and the wall stretched a vast drying ground, where fluttered newly-washed clothes hung out to dry; on the fruit bushes and shrubs also, with somewhat weird effect, lay long white garments. The timid might easily conjure up a world of ghosts here, the clothes taking grotesquely human forms as the night wind swayed them gently to and fro. With a calculation and an ingenuity only called forth of despair, the fugitive had chosen for her purpose the one night of the year offering a combination of favourable circumstances. Not only was the entire household worn out with fatigue ; not only did the process of house cleaning and renovation necessitate the opening of doors, otherwise barred and bolted; but the great spring washing, when the clothes remained out-of-doors all night, afforded an additional chance of escape. Even were some vigilant eye upon the drying ground, amid the changing lights and shadows and the phantasmagoria of white spectres, as the long garments indeed looked, a stealthy figure could easily elude observation. And almost superhuman was the dexterity and absolute noiselessness with which this one had contrived to get so far, having safely stolen from the cell shared with a companion ; fortunately for her the heaviest sleeper of the whole community. To glide through a newly white-washed corridor, every window of which stood wide open, to descend a side staircase appropriated to the use of the lay sisters, to boldly cross their dormitory, where all six lay snoring in company, take down from the door the key of the kitchen, thence enter the garden—all this seemed miraculous now it was done. But it had been done! With beating heart she paused for a moment, at first too wildly thankful to go on, too passionately exultant to realise how much still remained to be accomplished. Murmuring a childish little prayer, raising her rosary to her lips, she crossed the drying-ground, taking care to hide herself between the rows of white linen. Timid as a hare with the pack at its heels, coursing as a fawn wi.hin near approach of its pursuers, her pulses afire and breath held close, she GoOnmilGaooks (SO