into my
eyes, and said, 'You are at home.' And the Convent has been my home ever
since, and I hope with all my heart it always will be!"

Greta descended from the desk. She drew her embroidered cambric skirts
primly about her, and said in a shocked voice:

"And I asked you to visit me--to come and stay with us at our place near
Johannesburg--you who are not even respectable!"

Lynette grew burning red. One moment her eyes wavered and fell. Then she
lifted them and looked back bravely into the pretty, shallow, blue ones.

"That is why I have told you--what you know now."

"Of course," Greta said patronisingly, "if you wish it, I shall not tell
the class."

Lynette deliberately put away her tools and the calf-bound volume she had
been working on, and shut and locked her desk. Then she rose. Her eyes
swept over the long room, its lower end packed with giggling, whispering,
squabbling, listening, gossiping, or reading girls. She said very clearly:

"It will be best that you should tell the class. Do it now. The girls can
think it over while they are away, and make up their minds whether they
will speak to me or not when they come back. Make no delay."

Then she went, moving with the long, smooth, light step and upright,
graceful carriage that she had somehow caught from the Mother-Superior,
out of the room. Curious eyes followed her; sharp ears, that had caught
fragments of the colloquy, wanted the rest; eager tongues plied Greta with
questions, as she stood reticent, knowing, bursting with information
withheld, in the middle of the class-room, where honours she coveted had
been won and prizes gained by the charity-bred foundling.

You may be sure that Greta told the story. It lost nothing by her telling,
be equally sure. But all that heard it did not take it in Greta's way. The
stamp of the woman who ruled this place was upon many minds and intellects
and hearts here, and her teaching was to bear fruit in bitter, stormy,
bloodstained years of days that were waiting at the very threshold.

"I tell you," said Christine Silber, the handsome Jewess, with a fierce
flash of her black Oriental eyes, "foundling or charity girl, or whatever
else you choose to call her, Lynette Mildare is the pride of the school."

Silber's father was President of the Groenfontein Legislative Council. A
hum of assent followed on her utterance, and an English girl got up upon a
form. She was the niece of a High Commissioner, daughter of a S