an inner refreshment saloon to satisfy himself. Any one of the
pretty girls seated there might have been the one who had just entered,
but none was the one he sought. He hurried into the street again,--he
had wasted a precious moment,--and resumed his watch. The sun had
sunk, the Angelus had rung out of a chapel belfry, and shadows were
darkening the vista of the Alameda. She had not come. Perhaps she had
thought better of it; perhaps she had been prevented; perhaps the whole
appointment had been only a trick of some day-scholars, who were
laughing at him behind some window. In proportion as he became
convinced that she was not coming, he was conscious of a keen despair
growing in his heart, and a sickening remorse that he had ever thought
of preventing her. And when he at last reluctantly reentered the
hotel, he was as miserable over the conviction that she was not coming
as he had been at her expected arrival. The porter met him hurriedly
in the hall.

"Sister Seraphina of the Sacred Heart has been here, in a hurry to see
you on a matter of importance," he said, eyeing Key somewhat curiously.
"She would not wait in the public parlor, as she said her business was
confidential, so I have put her in a private sitting-room on your
floor."

Key felt the blood leave his cheeks. The secret was out for all his
precaution. The Lady Superior had discovered the girl's flight,--or
her attempt. One of the governing sisterhood was here to arraign him
for it, or at least prevent an open scandal. Yet he was resolved; and
seizing this last straw, he hurriedly mounted the stairs, determined to
do battle at any risk for the girl's safety, and to perjure himself to
any extent.

She was standing in the room by the window. The light fell upon the
coarse serge dress with its white facings, on the single girdle that
scarcely defined the formless waist, on the huge crucifix that dangled
ungracefully almost to her knees, on the hideous, white-winged coif
that, with the coarse but dense white veil, was itself a renunciation
of all human vanity. It was a figure he remembered well as a boy, and
even in his excitement and half resentment touched him now, as when a
boy, with a sense of its pathetic isolation. His head bowed with
boyish deference as she approached gently, passed him a slight
salutation, and closed the door that he had forgotten to shut behind
him.

Then, with a rapid movement, so quick that he could scarcely fol