a saucepan.

I was so absorbed by all I saw that I forgot to eat until Mildred nudged
me to do so, and even when my spoon was half way to my mouth something
happened which brought it down again.

At the tinkle of a hand-bell one of the big girls had stepped up to the
reading-desk and begun to read from a book which I afterwards knew to be
"The Imitation of Christ." She was about sixteen years of age, and her
face was so vivid that I could not take my eyes off it.

Her complexion was fair and her hair was auburn, but her eyes were so
dark and searching that when she raised her head, as she often did, they
seemed to look through and through you.

"Who is she?" I whispered.

"Alma Lier," Mildred whispered back, and when breakfast was over, and we
were trooping off to lessons, she told me something about her.

Alma was an American. Her father was very rich and his home was in New
York. But her mother lived in Paris, though she was staying at an hotel
in Rome at present, and sometimes she came in a carriage to take her
daughter for a drive.

Alma was the cleverest girl in the school too, and sometimes at the end
of terms, when parents and friends came to the Convent and one of the
Cardinals distributed the prizes, she had so many books to take away
that she could hardly carry them down from the platform.

I listened to this with admiring awe, thinking Alma the most wonderful
and worshipful of all creatures, and when I remember it now, after all
these years, and the bitter experiences which have come with them, I
hardly know whether to laugh or cry at the thought that such was the
impression she first made on me.

My class was with the youngest of the children, and Sister Angela was my
teacher. She was so sweet to me that her encouragement was like a kiss
and her reproof like a caress; but I could think of nothing but Alma,
and at noon, when the bell rang for lunch and Mildred took me back to
the Refectory, I wondered if the same girl would read again.

She did, but this time in a foreign language, French as Mildred
whispered--from the letters of the Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque--and
my admiration for Alma went up tenfold. I wondered if it could possibly
occur that I should ever come to know her.

There is no worship like that of a child, and life for me, which had
seemed so cold and dark the day before, became warm and bright with a
new splendour.

I was impatient of everything that took me away from the oppo