s grounds, and its several institutions which have
been built on sites of mansions demolished during the past five years or
so.

The Convent of Saint Agnes was a big building, constructed specially by
the Order some twenty years ago. Shut off from the dusty, narrow roads
by a high, grey wall with a small, arched door as the only entrance, it
stood about half-way between the border of Barnes Common and Richmond
Park, a place with many little arched windows and a niche with a statue
of the Virgin over the door.

Here the Mother Superior--a woman slightly older than the directress in
Paris, but with a face rather more pleasant--welcomed her warmly, and
before the next day had passed Jean had settled down to her duties--the
same as those in Paris, the mending of linen, at which she had become an
adept.

In the dull November days, as she sat at the window of the linen-room
overlooking the frost-bitten garden with its leafless trees and dead
flowers, she fell to wondering how Ralph fared. She wondered how all her
friends were at the Maison Collette, and who was now proprietor of her
dead father's little restaurant in Oxford Street.

Through the open windows of her little cubicle, in the silence of night,
she could see the red glare over London, and could hear the distant roar
of the great Metropolis. Oft-times she lay thinking for hours, thinking
and wondering what had become of the man she so unwisely loved--the man
who had destroyed all her fondest hopes and illusions.

December went on, a new year dawned--a year of new hopes and new
resolutions.

She had settled down in her new home, and, among the English sisters,
found herself just as happy as she had been at Enghien. No one in the
whole sisterhood was more attentive to her instruction, both religious
and in nursing, for she was looking forward with hope that by March she
would pass from the grade of probationer to that of nurse, and that she
would soon go forth upon her errands of mercy among the poor and
afflicted.

And so, after the storm and stress of life in the underworld of Paris,
Jean Ansell lived in an atmosphere of devotion, of perfect happiness,
and blissful peace.

CHAPTER XIV.

JEAN LEARNS THE TRUTH.

Months--months of a quiet, peaceful, uneventful life--went by, and Jean
had become even more popular among the English sisters than she had been
in Paris.

Though her life had so entirely changed, and she had naught to worry
her, not a t