eize the grill in both hands and shake it with all my
weakened strength. It made quite a rattling, and then I heard hurrying
feet, and presently the small, startled face of a nun peered through
the grating.

"I want to see the Mother Superior," I said in a trembling voice.

She looked at me sharply, and, I thought, a little as if she were
frightened. "Why didn't you ring the bell?" she asked.

"The bell? What bell?" I stammered, for the only bell I could call to
mind was the bell the Spanish Woman had rung. Then, as the sister
appeared to be about to draw back, "Oh, please, please," I cried, "take
me to the Mother Superior! I am in great trouble!"

There was a pause; then a little rustling, then a whispering of voices
behind the grating, and another face, rounder and larger than the
first, peered out; and a more sympathetic voice said: "Poor little
creature! and her hat is all on one side!"

Then, after some further deliberation, in which one of the voices
seemed to be protesting that it was afraid of something, the nun who
had come first disappeared,--I could hear the sound of her feet
hastening away,--and the second opened the grating and drew me in. She
led me down a narrow, musty-smelling hall and into a dull little room
where she made me sit down, and put my hat straight, and smoothed my
hair very kindly but rather clumsily with hands like white pincushions.
At last, with the timid nun following furtively at her heels, the
Mother Superior came. She was a thin woman in flowing robes, with a
great white sheer coif around her delicate face; and she looked at me
very kindly and benevolently while I stammered out the essentials of my
story--how the Spanish Woman had tried to keep me in her house, and how
I got out of the window and through a hole in the wall and so down into
the garden. When I came to this point in my tale, "But those windows
are closed up!" cried one of the nuns. "And the wall is eight feet!"
cried the other, "and there is no hole in it! It would be impossible!"

The Mother Superior shook her head at them, and said to me: "Can you
tell me where you live, my child?"

I thought it odd that there should be any doubt in her mind as to that,
but I eagerly gave her the number and the street. "And if you will
only send for a carriage," I said, "because I am afraid I am too tired
to walk, I should like to go home."

"It will be best to notify your parents," she said in a soothing voice,
"an