Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/266

 It and some caterpillars she had also separated from their kind furnished material for an instructive discourse, but Saint Ernesta was too wise for that. The child hardly realized how much she was learning from the simple words that fell from the nun's lips, but she herself was at her best in the half-hour that followed, and several times Sister Ernesta looked at her with an unusual gleam of interest in her old eyes.

With some other than Mercedes the episode might have been the beginning of one of the strong friendships so often formed between pupil and Sister. Not so with the Imp. If she felt the human impulse, she crushed it, and made herself unusually obnoxious for several days to make up for it. She even took care at first to disappear when she saw Sister Ernesta approaching; but this tendency wore off after a time, and the two had several meetings, during which the Imp was confessedly on her guard. The talk between them was entirely impersonal and had to do with any living thing but Man. The subject of obstreperous little girls and their obvious duties was carefully avoided. From the first Sister Ernesta seemed to have a strange insight into the heart and mind of the Imp. She showed this, too, during the discussion about the child so often held in