aris long enough to see Margarita and wee Mary, with
their respective guardians, installed comfortably and charmingly in
the _Rue Marboeuf_, bade Roger god-speed across the Channel (I could
tell from the set of his shoulders how he would plunge into the work
there and how well-earned would be his flying trips Parisward!) and
then struck south into Italy, bent on a private errand of my own.

This was nothing less than the tracing, if possible, of Margarita's
Italian ancestry, a mission, needless to say, laid upon me by no one,
as she knew nothing of this and Roger, apparently, cared less. My
reasons for undertaking this search, which I well knew might prove
endless and was almost sure to be long, were a little obscure, even to
myself, but I now believe them to have sprung principally from my
smouldering rage against Sarah Bradley and her ugly insinuations--a
subject I have not dwelt upon in this narrative. But I have thought
much of it, and I believe now that my vow was registered from the hour
of the finding of the dispatch box which solved one-half of the
problem.

Sue Paynter was of great assistance to me here, and by judicious
questionings of Mother Bradley at the Convent and artless suggestions
and allusions when with the other good nuns, to whom she was honestly
attached and whom she often visited, she actually procured for me a
few vague clues, breathless rumours of those tragedies that rear, now
and then, their jagged, warning heads above the smooth pools of
cloister life. News travels fast and far among those quiet retreats;
some system of mysterious telegraphy links Rome and Quebec and New
York, and it was not without the name of a tiny town or two tucked
away in my mind and at least three noble families jotted down on the
inside cover of my bank-book that I started on my wild-goose chase.

They were, however, quite useless. Two of the noble families had held
no greater sinner than a postulant whose ardour had cooled during her
novitiate, and the third had paid for what was at best (or worst) a
slight indiscretion with a broken spirit and rapidly failing health.
It required no great exercise of detective powers to beg the genial
little doctor of each tiny neighbourhood for Italian lessons and I
learned more than his language from each. They were veritable hoards
of gossip and information of all sorts, and my ever ready and
unsuspected note-book held more than verb-contractions and strange
vagaries of local i