The nun looked at the old priest with round eyes of wonder.

"Father Quentin, what strange thing is this?" she uttered, fearfully.

"Ask me not to explain it, my good daughter; it is a manifestation of psychic power beyond human explanation," he replied, hastily quitting the room to seek the mother superior.

As a result of his interview with her, he was soon on his way toward Esplanade Street and Mme. Lorraine.

Seldom had the footsteps of such a holy man crossed the threshold of the gay and volatile French woman. She grew pale through her rouge and her powder when she read the name upon his card, and sent word that she was not at home.

He told the little page that he would wait until madame returned, and took a seat in the quiet salon.

Angry and baffled, Mme. Lorraine came down to him.

"BÉnedicitÉ, daughter," said Father Quentin; but she looked at him inquiringly, without bending her lovely head.

"I have come to see Eliot Van Zandt, who lies wounded in your house," he said, boldly.

She gave a quick, nervous start, perfectly perceptible to his eyes, and her glance sought his, full of frightened inquiry.

"The girl was right; he is hidden here," he thought, with fluttering pulses; but aloud he said, with pretended authority and outward calmness:

"Lead me to his presence; I must see the young man at once."

She had recovered her calmness as quickly as she had lost it.

"Holy father, you amaze me!" she exclaimed, haughtily. "The man is not here. I read in my paper only this morning that he had most mysteriously disappeared. But come, I see you do not believe me. You shall search my house."

He was a little staggered by her assurance.

"I do not wish to seem intrusive," he said; "but my informant was very positive."

Then he mentally shook himself. After all, he had no authority for his assertion, except the strange words of a girl who had just come out of a trance-like sleep—a girl who might simply have dreamed it all.

But he followed her all over the pretty, elegantly appointed house, the little page carrying the keys and unlocking door after door until he was sure that not an apartment in the house remained unvisited.

"You have a servant-woman, Mima," he said to her, as they descended the stairs.

"Yes," she replied; "Mima is in the kitchen, preparing luncheon. You shall see her, too, holy father."

Mima, at work over a dainty luncheon, bowed her head grimly to receive his blessing.

"You have been nursing a sick, a wounded man, Monsieur Van Zandt," he said, trying to take her by surprise; but she did not betray as much self-consciousness as her mistress.

"The holy father mistakes; I am a cook, not a nurse," she replied, coolly.

And so he came away baffled, after all.

Mme. Lorraine pressed a gold piece excitedly into the hand of the little page.

"Follow the good priest, and come back and tell me where he lives," she exclaimed.

Father Quentin went his way immediately back to the convent, with the story of his disappointment, and concluded that Little Nobody's dream had been simply a dream, with nothing supernatural about it. The light that had seemed to shine momentarily on the mystery of Eliot Van Zandt's fate went out in rayless darkness.

For the girl, she grew better and stronger daily, and submitted, with child-like patience, to the innumerable questions the good sisters asked her of her past life. They were shocked when she told them the story of her life with Mme. Lorraine, the life that she had counted of so little value that she had never even given her little white slave a name.

They went to Father Quentin with the shocking story—that the girl had no name, and that that heartless woman had called her Vixen, Savage, Baggage, Nobody, by turns. She must be baptized immediately.

The good priest was as heartily scandalized as one could wish. He chose a name at once for their charge. It was the sweet, simple one, Marie.

And that same day, in the little chapel, surrounded by the tearful nuns, Little Nobody stood before the altar and received the baptismal name, Marie.

The next day she was formally introduced into the convent school, which consisted of twenty young ladies, all boarders. She was cautioned to say nothing of her past life to her schoolmates. The priest said that she was a ward of his, and he wished the pupils to be very kind to Mlle. Marie, who, through the peculiar circumstances of her life, had not received necessary mental culture, and must now begin the rudiments of her education.

For downright, honest, uncompromising curiosity and rudeness, no class of human beings transcends the modern school-girl. The pupils of Le Bon Berger immediately set themselves to work to torture the new scholar—the little ignoramus, as they dubbed her. Such ignorance as this they had never encountered before. They teased and chaffed her in their audacious fashion, and speedily made her understand her humiliation—a great girl of fifteen or sixteen beginning to learn her alphabet like a child of five years!

She was used to being chaffed and despised, poor Little Nobody! It was the life at Mme. Loraine's over again, and the great dark eyes flashed in sullen scorn as they did then, and the small hands clinched themselves at her sides in impotent pain.

"I shall run away from here!" she thought, bitterly.

They had one habit with which they daily demonstrated to her their superior wisdom. At recess they would assemble in a great group and read aloud from the daily newspaper. Sitting apart under the great trees of the convent garden, the new pupil listened, against her will, to every word, and so there came to her one day, through this strange means, the news of Eliot Van Zandt's strange disappearance from the ranks of the living.

With dilated eyes, parted lips and wildly throbbing heart she listened, and when the reader's voice came to an end, the group was electrified by a spring and a rush and a vision of golden hair flying on the wind, as the new pupil flew, with the speed of an Atalanta, into the presence of the mother superior.

"What is the matter with Mademoiselle Marie? has she got a fit?" exclaimed the merry, mischievous school-girls.