John Boyle O'Reilly

“ When he passed her door a few weeks later, and saw within the sweet-faced Sister Cecilia, and heard, after so many years, the voice of her he loved, in one short sentence, which sent him away very happy, she dreamt not that a loving heart had drunk up her words as a parched field drinks the refreshing rain.
So strong and so futile are the outreachings of the soul. They must be mutual, or they are impotent and vain. Reciprocal, they draw together through the density of a planet. Single, the one reaches for the other weakly, as a shadow touches the precipice, hopelessly as death. ”

“ The four years of succeeding peace were the springtime and the early summer of her full life, during which the strong shoots grew forward towards the harvest of ripe womanhood.
Towards the end of these four years a word of change came to her cell—she was once more selected among the fifty female prisoners to be sent on the annual convict ship to west Australia. ”

“ This woman," and the voice of Sister Cecilia grew almost severe, "this terrible woman—I have heard that she is a bad and wretched woman, Alice—deserves nothing from you but justice. God demands justice to ourselves as well as to others." ”