the Colonel's restive charger,
and his the ears to receive Beauty's acknowledgments.

If he had known that her eyes had been too full of his own resplendent,
virile, glowing young personality, to even see the man who had stepped in
between her and possible danger! The most innocent girl will have her
ideal of a lover and thrill at the imagined touch, and furnish the dumb
image with a dream-voice that woos her in impossible, elaborate,
impassioned sentences, very unlike the real utterances of Love when he
comes. The blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, golden-locked St. Michael portrayed
in celestial-martial splendour upon one of the panels of the triptych over
the altar in the Convent chapel, had, as he bent stern young brows over
the writhing demon with the vainly-enveloping snake-folds, something of
the young soldier's look, it seemed to Lynette. Ridiculous and profane,
Sister Cleophee or Sister Ruperta would have said, to liken a handsome,
stupid, young lieutenant of Hussars to the immortal Captain of the Armies
of Heaven.

But she knew another who would understand. There was no flaw in the
perfect sympathy that maintained between Lynette and the Mother-Superior,
though, certainly, since the Colonel's visit of the previous day, the
Mother had seemed strangely preoccupied and sad.... Her good-night kiss,
invariably so warm and tender, had been the merest brush of lips against
the girl's soft cheek; her good-morning had been even more perfunctory;
her eyes, those great maternal radiances, turned their light elsewhere.
Unloved and neglected, the Convent's spoiled darling hugged her
abandonment, weaving a very pretty, ineffably silly romance, in which a
noble and beautiful young Hussar lover, suddenly appearing over the
corrugated-iron fence of the tennis-ground, the foliage of its fringe of
pepper-trees waving in the night-breeze, strode towards the slender white
figure leaning from her chamber-casement, whispering, with outstretched
hands, and eyes that gleamed through the darkness:

"_Open the door! Do you hear, you Kid? Open the door!_"

Her heart beat once, heavily, and seemed to stop. A cold breath seemed to
blow upon the little silken hair-tendrils at the nape of her white neck,
spreading a creeping, stiffening horror through her body, deadening
sensation, paralysing every limb.

The close approach of any man, even the thought of such contact, turned
her deadly faint, checked her pulses, stopped her breath. At picn