a close secret, and I suppose I may as well tell you that the
cause of her entering the sisterhood was nothing at all out of the
common. It was simply a thwarted love affair. You don't like that, I can
see by your face."

"No, I do not like it, and I am very sorry to hear it."

"My dear sir," said she, "you must be early on hand and prompt in action
to be Number One with a girl like Sylvia; but then, you know, a Number
One seldom counts. In this case, however, he did count, for he made a
Number Two impossible."

"Not so," I cried hotly. "I am Number Two, and shall always continue
so."

She laughed. "I am afraid," she said, "that it will be necessary for a
brother of the House of Martha to get rid of that sort of feeling."

"How was she thwarted?" I asked quickly.

"The story is briefly this," replied Miss Laniston: "A certain gentleman
courted Sylvia's cousin, and everybody supposed they would be married;
but in some way or other he treated her badly, and the match was broken
off; then, a few years later, this same person fell in love with Sylvia,
who knew nothing of the previous affair. The young girl found him a most
attractive lover, and he surely would have won her had not her mother
stepped in and put an extinguisher upon the whole affair. She knew what
had happened before, and would not have the man in her family. Then it
was that Sylvia found the world a blank, and concluded to enter the
sisterhood."

"Do you mean," I asked, "that the cousin with whom the man was first in
love was Marcia Raynor, Mother Anastasia?"

"Yes," answered Miss Laniston, "it was she. You do not like that?"

Like it! A cold and tingling pain ran through my body, and there sprang
up in me an emotion of the intensest hatred for a person whom I had
never seen.

My feelings were such as I could not express; the situation was one
which I could not discuss. I took leave of Miss Laniston without giving
sufficient consideration to her expression of countenance and to her
final words now to be able to say whether they indicated amusement or
sympathy.

XLII.

THE MOTHER SUPERIOR.

Seldom, I think, has a berth in a sleeping-car held a more
turbulent-minded man than I was during my journey from New York to
Washington. The revelation that the same man had loved and been loved by
Mother Anastasia and by Sylvia had disquieted me in a manner not easy to
explain; but I knew that I was being torn by jealousy, and jealousy is a
pass