C. N. Williamson & A. N. Williamson: 30+ Murder Mysteries & Adventure Novels (Illustrated). Charles Norris Williamson

father was and gently shut the door, leaving the two alone together. Mary had gone to him expecting a kiss, for he was always kind, though she did not feel that she knew him well—only a little better, perhaps, than the radiant young mother whom she seldom saw for more than five minutes at a time. But instead of kissing her as usual, he had turned upon her a look of dislike, almost of horror, which often came to her afterward, in dreams. Taking the little girl by the shoulder not ungently, but very coldly, and as if he were in a great hurry to be rid of her, he pushed rather than led her to the door. Opening it, he called the nurse, in a sharp, displeased voice. "I don't want the child," he said. "I can't have her here. Don't bring her to me again without being asked." Then the kind, fat old woman had caught Mary in her arms and carried her upstairs, a thing that had not happened for years. And in the nursery the good creature had cried over the "poor bairn" a good deal, mumbling strange things which Mary could not understand. But a few words had lingered in her memory, something about its being cruel and unjust to visit the sins of others on innocent babies. A few days afterward Mary's father, very thin and strange-looking, with hard lines in his handsome brown face, took her with him on a journey, after nurse had kissed her many times with streaming tears. At last they had got out of the train into a carriage, and driven a long way. At evening they had come to a tall, beautiful gateway, which had carved stone animals on high pillars at either side. That was the gate of the Convent of Saint Ursula-of-the-Lake, the gate of Mary's home-to-be: and in a big, bare parlour, with long windows and a polished oak floor that reflected curious white birds and dragons of an escutcheon on the ceiling, Reverend Mother had received them. She had taken Mary on her lap; and when, after much talk about school and years to come, the child's father had gone, shadowy, dark-robed women had glided softly into the room. They had crowded round the little girl, like children round a new doll, petting and murmuring over her: and she had been given cake and milk, and wonderful preserved fruit, such as she had never tasted.

      Some of those dear women had gone since then, not as she was going, out into an unknown, maybe disappointing, world, but to a place where happiness was certain, according to their faith. Mary had not forgotten one of the kind faces—and all those who remained she loved dearly; yet she was leaving them to-day. Already it was time. She had wished to come out into the garden alone for this last walk, and to wear the habit of her novitiate, though she had voluntarily given up the right to it forever. She must go in and dress for the world, as she had not dressed for years which seemed twice their real length. She must go in, and bid them all goodbye—Reverend Mother, and the nuns, and novices, and the schoolgirls, of whose number she had once been.

      She stood still, looking toward the far end of the path, her back turned toward the gray face of the convent.

      "Goodbye, dear old sundial, that has told so many of my hours," she said. "Goodbye, sweet rose-trees that I planted, and all the others I've loved so long. Goodbye, dear laurel bushes, that know my thoughts. Goodbye, everything."

      Her arms hung at her sides, lost in the folds of her veil. Slowly tears filled her eyes, but did not fall until a delicate sound of light-running feet on grass made her start, and wink the tears away. They rolled down her white cheeks in four bright drops, which she hastily dried with the back of her hand; and no more tears followed. When she was sure of herself, she turned and saw a girl running to her from the house, a pretty, brown-haired girl in a blue dress that looked very frivolous and worldly in contrast to Mary's habit. But the bushes and the sundial, and the fading flowers that tapestried the ivy on the old wall, were used to such frivolities. Generations of schoolgirls, taught and guarded by the Sisters of Saint Ursula-of-the-Lake, had played and whispered secrets along this garden path.

      "Dearest Mary!" exclaimed the girl in blue. "I begged them to let me come to you just for a few minutes—a last talk. Do you mind?"

      Mary had wanted to be alone, but suddenly she was glad that, after all, this girl was with her. "You call me 'Mary'!" she said. "How strange it seems to be Mary again—almost wrong, and—frightening."

      "But you're not Sister Rose any longer," the girl in blue answered. "There's nothing remote about you now. You're my dear old chum, just as you used to be. And will you please begin to be frivolous by calling me Peter?"

      Mary smiled, and two round dimples showed themselves in the cheeks still wet with tears. She and this girl, four years younger than herself, had begun to love each other dearly in school days, when Mary Grant was nineteen, and Mary Maxwell fifteen. They had gone on loving each other dearly till the elder Mary was twenty-one, and the younger seventeen. Then Molly Maxwell—who named herself "Peter Pan" because she hated the thought of growing up—had to go back to her home in America and "come out," to please her father, who was by birth a Scotsman, but who had made his money in New York. After three gay seasons she had begged to return for six months to school, and see her friend Mary Grant—Sister Rose—before the final vows were taken. Also she had wished to see another Mary, who had been almost equally her friend ("the three Maries" they had always been called, or "the Queen's Maries"); but the third of the three Maries had disappeared, and about her going there was a mystery which Reverend Mother did not wish to have broken.

      "Peter," Sister Rose echoed obediently, as the younger girl clasped her arm, making her walk slowly toward the sundial at the far end of the path.

      "It does sound good to hear you call me that again," Molly Maxwell said. "You've been so stiff and different since I came back and found you turned into Sister Rose. Often I've been sorry I came. And now, when I've got three months still to stay, you're going to leave me. If only you could have waited, to change your mind!"

      "If I had waited, I couldn't have changed it at all," Sister Rose reminded her. "You know——"

      "Yes, I know. It was the eleventh hour. Another week, and you would have taken your vows. Oh, I don't mean what I said, dear. I'm glad you're going—thankful. You hadn't the vocation. It would have killed you."

      "No. For here they make it hard for novices on purpose, so that they may know the worst there is to expect, and be sure they're strong enough in body and heart. I wasn't fit. I feared I wasn't——"

      "You weren't—that is, your body and heart are fitted for a different life. You'll be happy, very happy."

      "I wonder?" Mary said, in a whisper.

      "Of course you will. You'll tell me so when we meet again, out in my world that will be your world, too. I wish I were going with you now, and I could, of course. Only I had to beg the pater so hard to let me come here, I'd be ashamed to cable him, that I wanted to get away before the six months were up. He wouldn't understand how different everything is because I'm going to lose you."

      "In a way, you would have lost me if—if I'd stayed, and—everything had been as I expected."

      "I know. They've let you be with me more as a novice than you could be as a professed nun. Still, you'd have been under the same roof. I could have seen you often. But I am glad. I'm not thinking of myself. And we'll meet just as soon as we can, when my time's up here. Father's coming back to his dear native Fifeshire to fetch me, and I'll make him take me to you, wherever you are, or else you'll visit me; better still. But it seems a long time to wait, for I really did come back here to be a 'parlour boarder,' a heap more to see you than for any other reason. And, besides, there's another thing. Only I hardly know how to say it, or whether I dare say it at all."

      Sister Rose looked suddenly anxious, as if she were afraid of something that might follow. "What is it?" she asked quickly, almost sharply. "You must tell me."

      "Why, it's nothing to tell—exactly. It's only this: I'm worried. I'm glad you're not going to be a nun all your life, dear; delighted—enchanted. You're given back to me. But—I worry because I can't help feeling that I've got something to do with the changing of your mind so suddenly; that if ever you should regret anything—not that you will, but if you should—you might blame me, hate me, perhaps."

      "I never shall do either, whatever happens," the novice said, earnestly and gravely. She did not look at her friend as she spoke, though they were so nearly of the same height as they walked, their arms linked together, that they could gaze straight into one another's eyes. Instead, she looked up