ecretary of
Imperial Government, at Cape Town, who wrote K.C.M.G. after his name.

"Silber speaks the truth. Not a girl here is a patch on the shoes of
Lynette Mildare. I am going home to London next winter to be presented,
and we shall have a house in Chesterfield Gardens for the season, and if
Lynette will come and visit us, I can tell her that she will be treated as
an honoured guest. As for you, Greta Du Taine, who are always bragging
about your father and his money, tell me which three letters of the
alphabet you would find tattooed upon his conscience--if the strongest
microscope ever made could find his conscience out? Shall _I_ tell you
them?" She held up her finger. "Shall I tell you how he bought those
orange-groves at Rustenburg--and the country seat near Johannesburg--and
the drag with the silver-mounted harness and the team of blood bays?"

"No, please!" begged Greta, flinching from the torture.

But the English girl was pitiless. She checked the letters off upon her
fingers:

"I. D. B."

A shout went up from the Red Class.

Greta turned and ran.

IX

The cell was a large, light, airy room on the first-floor of the big
two-storied Convent building that stood in its spacious, tree-shaded,
high-fenced gardens beyond the Hospital at the north end of the town. Tall
stained-wood presses full of papers and account-files covered the wall
upon one side. There also stood a great iron safe, with heavy ledgers
piled upon it. Upon the other three sides of the room were bookshelves,
doubly and trebly laden, with Latin tomes of the Fathers of the Church,
and the works and writings of modern theologians, many of them categorised
upon the "Index Expurgatorius." Rows there were of English, French,
German, Italian, and Spanish classical authors, and many volumes of
recently-published scientific works. It might have been the room of a
business man who was at the same time a priest and a scholar. There were
roller maps upon the walls, and two or three engravings, Bougereau's
"Virgin of Consolation," the "Madonna dei Ansidei" of Raffaelle, and a
"Crucifixion" over the chimneypiece, which had three little statuettes in
tinted alabaster--a St. Ignatius at one end, a St. Anthony of Padua at the
other; in the middle, the Virgin bearing the Child.

The Mother-Superior sat writing at a bare solid deal table of the kitchen
kind, with stained legs to add to its ugliness, and stained black-knobbed
fronts to the drawer