yle and grace and breeding.
Anybody could tell that you came of tremendously swell people over away in
England, where the Dukes and Marquesses and Earls began fencing in the
veld somewhere about the eleventh century, to keep common people from
killing the deer, or carving their vulgar names on the castle walls, and
coming between the wind and their nobility. There's a quotation from your
dear Shakespeare for you! He does come in handy sometimes."

"Doesn't he!" agreed Lynette, with an ardent flush.

"And you're descended from some of the people he wrote about," pressed
Greta. "Own it!"

There was a faint line of sarcasm about the lovely lips.

"Shakespeare wrote of clowns and churls as well as of Kings and noblemen."

"If you were a clown, you wouldn't be what you are. The very shape of your
head, and ears, and nails, bespeaks a Princess, disguised as a finished
head-pupil, going to take over a class of grubby-fingered little
ones--pah!--next term. And don't we all know that an English Duchess sends
you your Christmas and Easter and birthday gifts! Come, you might as well
speak out, when this is my last term, and we have always been such dear
friends, and always will be," coaxed Greta, "because the Duchess lets you
out, you know!"

She said it so quaintly that Lynette laughed, though there was a pained
contraction between the delicate eyebrows and a vexed and sorrowful shadow
on her face. Greta went on:

"We have all of us always known that you were--a mystery. Has it got
anything to do with the Duchess?"

The round, shallow blue eyes were too greedily curious to be pretty at the
moment. Lynette met them with a full, grave, answering denial.

"No; I am nothing to the Duchess of Broads, or she to me. She is sister to
the Mother-Superior, and she sends to me at Christmas and Easter, and on
birthdays, by the Mother's wish. Doesn't the Mother's second sister, the
Princesse de Dignmont-Veziers, send Katie"--Katie was a little Irish
novice--"presents from Paris twice a year?"

Greta's pretty eyebrows went up. Her blue greedy eyes became circular with
surprise.

"Yes, of course--out of charity, because Katie was a foundling, picked up
in the Irish quarter in Cape Town."

Lynette went on steadily, but, looking out of the window at the great
wistaria that climbed upon the angle of the Convent wing in which were the
nuns' cells.

"If Katie was a foundling, I am nothing better."

"Lynette Mildare, you're never in