Her evil genius

The summer holidays had begun and the great convent school was deserted, all its pupils gone but two, who were in the alcove belonging to the elder of them, and, as if that breakage of rule were not enough, were seated on the small white bed which was counted a crime to rumple.

The elder girl was eighteen, and after to-day convent rules would concern her no more, for that very afternoon she was going out into “the world” to earn her own living as a governess. She was wild with excitement, and would have been enraptured with the foretaste of liberty had it not been for the child who clung to her, sick and exhausted with stormy crying.

She looked down on her pityingly, and the reverend mother could have told you Andria Heathcote was not given to compassion. Her red-brown hair grew too strongly on her forehead for that; her full rose lips were too heavy. Yet something in the very strangeness of the girl who clutched her had caught at her hard young heart.

For Beryl Corselas was only a child, and young for her years at that. It seemed to Andria that the sins of eleven years old were too seriously taken when they were considered crimes, and yet her goblin ways were enough to provoke a saint--or Sister Felicitas!

“Beryl, look here,” repeated Andria; “don’t cry any more. I’ll write to you. I’m not going very far away.”

The child lifted her face from the girl’s shoulder. It was a curious face, with something almost vacant about it, yet what the lack was no one could quite say. She had extraordinary eyes, strangely and uncannily beautiful, so light a brown as to be almost yellow, tawny golden under the heavy eyelashes, that were black as ink. The warm whiteness of her cheeks was blurred with crying, paled with real despair, and the startling crimson of the childish lips had been hard bitten to check the sobs that might be heard.

She pushed away the long cloud of straight hair that was not black nor brown, but dusky, a cloud of darkness with no color to be named, from her face, and spoke with sullen, unchildlike contempt.

“You won’t write!” Her eyes were like burned-out coals. “You’ll mean to, but you won’t. You’re always trying to save other people’s feelings outside, but inside you never care. You’ll forget!”

“I’ll try not to,” said Andria, with a sudden pang. Was she really what Beryl said? Did her hatred of giving pain really make her more cruel in the end? She kissed the wet cheek.

“If I do forget, if I am like that, will you promise me something? Remember that I don’t mean to forget, and that I don’t, really. Think to yourself it’s just my way, and that some day you’ll see me again. Will you try, Beryl?”

“It’s no use my trying anything without you--in the house with Sister Felicitas!”

“Keep out of her way, then! Why are you always getting into her black books?”

“Because she hates me. I’m never myself with her.”

“You are with Mother Benedicta!”

“I might as well be comfortable with the statue in the chapel! I see about as much of her.”

She clung suddenly to the arm that enwrapped her.

“Oh, it’s you I want--you!” she gasped. “If I’m going to be good it will be for you. Who else do I like? Just you and animals--and I haven’t any of them except my rabbits. And I hate, hate, hate Sister Felicitas!”

A shadow, tall, slight, and angular, fell on them.

Andria looked up with a start, since convent tradition was still strong in her, and she was breaking rules openly. Sister Felicitas stood in the doorway, black against the sunlit passage.