s of her novitiate, made her piteous in her
friend's eyes. The American girl hotly repented not writing to her
father in New York and telling him that she must leave the convent with
Mary Grant. Probably he would not have consented, but she might have
found some way of persuading him to change his mind. Or she could have
gone without his consent, and made him forgive her afterward. Even now
she might go; but dimly and sadly she felt that Mary did not really wish
for her superior knowledge of the world to lean upon; Mary longed to
find out things for herself.

Peter did not sleep well that night, and when she did sleep she dreamed
a startling dream of Mary at Monte Carlo.

"She'll go there!" the girl said to herself, waking. "I know she'll go.
I don't know why I know it, but I do."

Trying to doze again, she lay with closed eyes; and a procession of
strange, unwished-for thoughts busily pushed sleep away from her brain.
She seemed to see people hurrying from many different parts of the
world, with their minds all bent on the same thing: getting to Monte
Carlo as soon as possible. She saw these people, good and bad, mingling
their lives with Mary's life; and she saw the Fates, like Macbeth's
witches, laughing and pulling the strings which controlled these
people's actions toward Mary, hers toward them, as if they were all
marionettes.

II

Lady MacMillan of Linlochtry Castle, who was a devout Catholic, came
often from her place in the neighbourhood to see her half-sister, Mother
Superior at the Convent of St. Ursula-of-the-Lake. Mary Grant's only
knowledge of the world outside the convent had been given her by Lady
MacMillan, with whom when a schoolgirl she had sometimes spent a few
days, and might have stopped longer if she had not invariably been
seized by pangs of homesickness. Lady MacMillan's household, to be sure,
did not afford many facilities for forming an opinion of the world at
large, though a number of carefully selected young people had been
entertained for Mary's benefit. Its mistress was an elderly widow, and
had been elderly when the child saw her first: but occasionally, before
she became a postulant, Mary had been taken to Perth to help Lady
MacMillan do a little shopping; and once she had actually stayed from
Saturday to Tuesday at Aberdeen, where she had been to the theatre. This
was a memorable event; and the sisters at the convent had never tired of
hearing the fortunate girl describe h