g was highly excited over her appearance.
Once, when she was particularly engaged at the looking-glass, she heard
some one fumbling at the half-door, as if anxious to come into the
kitchen. Angry at being disturbed, she burst from her room, and saw in
the framework of the door an awful sight. It was a poor woman, whose
face was completely eaten away by a dread disease called nasal polypus.
The nose was completely gone and the upper lip. The eyes stared out as
if from a death's-head. The poor creature begged for alms; but Alice,
flushed at the thought of her own beauty, and in a rage from being
called away from her glass, clapped her hands and shouted:--

"Well, you _are_ a beauty."

"Not so handsome as you, alanna," said the afflicted one. "There was
wance when, perhaps, I was. But your time may come. Mockin' is catchin'.
Mockin' is catchin'."

And with these words the woman strode away.

"I could not get the thought of my sin out of my head all that day,"
continued Alice; "her face was always coming before me, until at last I
gave up looking at the glass. But when the night came and we were all in
the concert-room, my vanity came back again, for I heard people whisper
as I was passing, and my foolish head was turned. Then, when it was all
over, and the girls broke into groups, and the people were all around, I
tried to attract more attention. And I had been reading of a trick in
the novels for making one's self more interesting by standing on tiptoe
and opening the eyes widely; and, God help me! I was practising this
foolishness, thinking that some of the young men were admiring me for
it, when suddenly Father Letheby saw me, and he gave me a look that
struck me like a flash of lightning. I felt dazed and blinded, and asked
one of the girls to take me from the room and lead me home. But all that
night I never slept, the woman's face and the awful look that Father
Letheby gave me were staring at me out of the curtains and out of the
dark, until late in the morning I fell into a sleep, only to dream the
same dreadful things."

Here the poor girl broke down and sobbed in an agony of remorse.

"Well, then, Father, I got up sick and sorrowful, and before my
breakfast I went over there to the Blessed Virgin's altar and said a
Rosary, and begged and prayed her not to punish me for what I had done.
Sure, I said, 't was only a girl's foolishness and I was young; and I
promised then and there to give up novel-reading and t