her advised. I was so sure
there could be no home for me but this. Then came the change. Oh, Peter,
I hope it wasn't the legacy! I pray I'm not so mean as that!"

"How long was it after your novitiate began that the money was left
you?" Peter asked: for this was the first intimate talk alone and
undisturbed that she had had with her old school friend since coming
back to the convent three months ago. She knew vaguely that a cousin of
Mary's dead father had left the novice money, and that it had been
unexpected, as the lady was not a Roman Catholic, and had relations just
as near, of her own religion. But Peter did not quite know when the news
had come, or what had happened then.

"It was the very next day. That was odd, wasn't it? Though I don't know,
exactly, why it should have seemed odd. It had to happen on some day.
Why not that one? I was glad I should have a good dowry--quite proud to
be of some use to the convent. I didn't think what I might have done for
myself, if I'd been in the world--not then. But afterward, thoughts
crept into my head. I used to push them out again as fast as they
crawled in, and I told myself what a good thing I had a safe refuge,
remembering my father, what he wrote about himself, and my mother."

For a moment she was silent. There was no need to explain, for Peter
knew all about the terrible letter that had come from India with the
news of Major Grant's death. It had arrived before Mary resolved to take
vows, while she was still a fellow schoolgirl of Peter's, older than
most of the girls, looked up to and adored, and probably it had done
more than anything else to decide her that she had a "vocation." Mary
had told about the letter at the time, with stormy tears: how her father
in dying wrote down the story of the past, as a warning to his daughter,
whom he had not loved; told the girl that her mother had run away with
one of his brother officers; that he, springing from a family of
reckless gamblers, had himself become a gambler; that he had thrown away
most of his money; and that his last words to Mary were, "You have wild
blood in your veins. Be careful: don't let it ruin your life, as two
other lives have been ruined before you."

"Then," Mary went on, while Peter waited, "for a few weeks, or a few
days, I would be more peaceful. But the restlessness always came again.
And, after the end of the first year, it grew worse. I was never happy
for more than a few hours together. Still