s black as her dress; her eyes, when one saw
them, seemed blacker than either, on account of the bluishness of the
white surrounding the pupil. Her eyelashes were almost as thick as the
black veil which the sisters had fastened around her hat with an extra
pin the very last thing before leaving. She had a round little face,
and a tiny pointed chin; her mouth was slightly protuberant from the
teeth, over which she tried to keep her lips well shut, the effort
giving them a pathetic little forced expression. Her complexion was
sallow, a pale sallow, the complexion of a brunette bleached in
darkened rooms. The only color about her was a blue taffeta ribbon
from which a large silver medal of the Virgin hung over the place
where a breast pin should have been. She was so little, so little,
although she was eighteen, as the sisters told the captain; otherwise
they would not have permitted her to travel all the way to New Orleans
alone.

Unless the captain or the clerk remembered to fetch her out in front,
she would sit all day in the cabin, in the same place, crocheting
lace, her spool of thread and box of patterns in her lap, on the
handkerchief spread to save her new dress. Never leaning back--oh, no!
always straight and stiff, as if the conventual back board were there
within call. She would eat only convent fare at first, notwithstanding
the importunities of the waiters, and the jocularities of the captain,
and particularly of the clerk. Every one knows the fund of humor
possessed by a steamboat clerk, and what a field for display the table
at meal-times affords. On Friday she fasted rigidly, and she never
began to eat, or finished, without a little Latin movement of the lips
and a sign of the cross. And always at six o'clock of the evening she
remembered the angelus, although there was no church bell to remind
her of it.

She was in mourning for her father, the sisters told the captain,
and she was going to New Orleans to her mother. She had not seen
her mother since she was an infant, on account of some disagreement
between the parents, in consequence of which the father had brought
her to Cincinnati, and placed her in the convent. There she had been
for twelve years, only going to her father for vacations and holidays.
So long as the father lived he would never let the child have any
communication with her mother. Now that he was dead all that was
changed, and the first thing that the girl herself wanted to do was to