And during those years her soul had been fed on a contemplative, ecstatic religion, a kind of sanctified superstition, which she would have deemed sacrilege to combat.
Her first step into womanhood was taken with that oath upon her lips; since then, with a stoical sense of duty, she had lashed herself into a daily, hourly remembrance of the great mission imposed upon her.
To have neglected it would have been, to her, equal to denying God.
She had but vague ideas of the doctrinal side of religion.

Purgatory was to her merely a word, but a word representing a real spiritual state--one of expectancy, of restlessness, of sorrow.

And vaguely, yet determinedly, she believed that her brother's soul suffered, because she had been too weak to fulfil her oath.
The Church had not come to her rescue.

The ministers of her religion were scattered to the four corners of besieged, agonising France.

She had no one to help her, no one to comfort her.