e evil to him of Rachela and Fray Ignatius?"

"Neither of them are our friends; do you think so?"

"Fray Ignatius looks like a goblin; he gives me a shiver when he looks
at me; and as for Rachela--I already hate her!"

"Do not trust her. You need not hate her, Isabel."

"Antonia, I know that I shall eternally hate her; for I am sure that our
angels are at variance."

In conversations like these the anxious girls passed the long, and
often very cold, nights. The days were still worse, for as November went
slowly away the circumstances which surrounded their lives appeared to
constantly gather a more decided and a bitterer tone. December, that
had always been such a month of happiness, bright with Christmas
expectations and Christmas joys, came in with a terribly severe, wet
norther. The great log fires only warmed the atmosphere immediately
surrounding them, and Isabel and Antonia sat gloomily within it all day.
It seemed to Antonia as if her heart had come to the very end of hope;
and that something must happen.

The rain lashed the earth; the wind roared around the house, and filled
it with unusual noises. The cold was a torture that few found themselves
able to endure. But it brought a compensation. Fray Ignatius did not
leave the Mission comforts; and Rachela could not bear to go prowling
about the corridors and passages. She established herself in the
Senora's room, and remained there. And very early in the evening she
said "she had an outrageous headache," and went to her room.

Then Antonia and Isabel sat awhile by their mother's bed. They talked in
whispers of their father and brothers, and when the Senora cried, they
kissed her sobs into silence and wiped her tears away. In that hour, if
Fray Ignatius had known it, they undid, in a great measure, the work to
which he had given more than a month of patient and deeply-reflective
labor. For with the girls, there was the wondrous charm of love and
nature; but with the priest, only a splendid ideal of a Church universal
that was to swallow up all the claims of love and all the ties of
nature.

It was nearly nine o'clock when Antonia and Isabel returned to the
parlor fire. Their hearts were full of sorrow for their mother, and
of fears for their own future. For this confidence had shown them how
firmly the refuge of the convent had been planted in the anxious ideas
of the Senora. Fortunately, the cold had driven the servants either to
the kitchen fire or to t