ide him. There was the Chapel of Retreat,
a room where the nuns came and spent hours on their knees. They passed
that, going down a wide hall. On one side some young girls sat doing
fine embroidery for religious purposes. At the end a kind of reception
room, and there were several people in this now, two priests and three
woman in the garb of Ursuline nuns.

Jeanne glanced around. A sort of chill crept over her. The room was bare
and plain except a statue of the Virgin, and some candles and
crucifixes. Nearly in the center stood a table with a book of devotions
on it.

"This is Jeanne Angelot," exclaimed Father Rameau. She, in her youth and
health and beauty, coming out of the warm and glowing sunshine of May,
brought with her an atmosphere and radiance that seemed like a sudden
sunrise in the dingy apartment. The three women in the coif and gown of
the Ursulines fingered their beads and, after sharp glances at the maid,
dropped their eyes, and their faces fell into stolid lines.

Another woman rose from the far corner and her gown made a swish on the
bare floor. She came almost up to Jeanne, who shrank back in an
inexplicable terror, a motion that brought a spasm of color to the
newcomer's face, and a gasp for breath.

She was, perhaps, a little above the medium height, slim alway and now
very thin. Her eyes were sunken, with grayish shadows underneath, her
cheeks had a hollow where fullness should have been, her lips were
compressed in a nearly straight line. She was not old, but asceticism
had robbed her of every indication of youth, had made severity the
leading indication in her countenance.

"Jeanne Angelot," she repeated. "You are quite sure, Father, those
garments belonged to her?"

The poor woman felt the secret antipathy and she, too, seemed to
contract, to realize the mysterious distance between them, the
unlikeness of which she had not dreamed. For in her narrow life of
devotion she had endeavored to crucify all human feelings and
affections. That was her bounden duty for her girlhood's sin. Girls were
poor, weak creatures and their wills counseled them wrongly, wickedly.
She had come to snatch this child, the result of her own selfish dreams,
her waywardness, from a like fate. She should be housed, safe, kept from
evil. The nun, too, had dreamed, although Berthe Campeau had said, "She
is a wild little thing and it is suspected she has Indian blood in her
veins." But it was the rescue of a soul to the