re the other day that Mr. Van Ostend had been to see her in regard to
the child. It seems he has found a place for her in the country with
some of his relations, as I understand it. He said his interest in her
had been roused when he heard her for the first time on the stage, and
that when he found Flibbertigibbet was the little acquaintance his
daughter had made, he determined to further the child's interests so far
as a home is concerned."

"Then there is a prospect of her going," Sister Agatha drew a breath of
relief. "Did you hear what Father Honore said?"

"Very little; but I noticed he looked pleased, and I heard him say,
'This is working out all right; I'll step across and see Mr. Van Ostend
myself.'--I shall miss her so!"

Sister Agatha made no reply. Together the two sisters continued to pace
the dim corridor, silent each with her thoughts; and, pacing thus, up
and down, up and down, the slender, black-robed figures were soon lost
in the increasing darkness and became mere neutral outlines as they
passed the high bare windows and entered their respective rooms.

Even so, a few weeks later when Number 208 left the Orphan Asylum on
----nd Street, they passed quietly out of the child's actual life and
entered the fitfully lighted chambers of her childish memory wherein, at
times, they paced with noiseless footsteps as once in the barren halls
of her orphanage home.

PART SECOND

Home Soil

I

A land of entrancing inner waters, our own marvellous Lake Country of
the East, lies just behind those mountains of Maine that sink their
bases in the Atlantic and are fitly termed in Indian nomenclature
_Waves-of-the-Sea_. Bight and bay indent this mountainous coast, in
beauty comparable, if less sublime yet more enticing, to the Norwegian
fjords; within them are set the islands large and small whereon the
sheep, sheltered by cedar coverts, crop the short thick turf that is
nourished by mists from the Atlantic. Above bight and bay and island
tower the mountains. Their broad green flanks catch the earliest eastern
and the latest western lights. Their bare summits are lifted boldly into
the infinite blue that is reflected in the waters which lap their
foundations.

Flamsted lies at the outlet of Lake Mesantic, on the gentle northward
slope of these _Waves-of-the-Sea_, some eighteen miles inland from
Penobscot Bay. Until the last decade of the nineteenth century it was
unconnected with the coast by any railr