Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/196

 when you act like this? The boys are afraid of you, and the girls say things about you. It is your own fault, too."

She shrank still farther into her corner and refused to leave it. But even the shy pleasure of looking on was gone. She crept away to her room.

Another recollection burned on the mental screen. The lonely child had become a young lady, after painful struggles with the diffidence of youth. She was waiting in the conservatory to be claimed by her partner for a waltz already begun when his voice reached her ear.

"I must leave you, Harry," he said, "and find Miss Everts. I have this dance with her—for my sins, I suppose. Stand by me after it, for I shall want to be thawed out. Did you ever know a girl that was such a lump of ice? She makes my teeth chatter."

The flippant words rang in her ears as she stole away. What was it about her, she wondered, that repelled? She did not know.

Linked with these words in her memory were those uttered, several years afterwards, in the interval between graduation and her novitiate, by the one man whose proposal of marriage had seemed to call for consideration. She had cared for Edward Carrington; had deeply liked