The words were not meant for my hearing, but they stung me as a buffet. I flashed back like a wild creature on flame, and stood panting in front of my enemy, while Adelaide, pale and trembling, caught my dress behind. "I heard what you said, and it's a lie. I'm not a common little Irish thing. I am just as good as Lady Adelaide--or you, or anybody else. The Irish are much nicer than the English any day, ever so much nicer,--there, and I hate you, so I do." "Oh, Angela!" sobbed Adelaide, clutching at my dress. "Let me alone, you too!" I screamed, beside myself with passion. "I don't care whether you are handsomer than I, for you're just an ordinary little girl, not half as clever as I." Adelaide, who had a spirit of her own, retorted in proper fashion, and before Sister Esmeralda had time to shake me and push me in before her, I struck the poor little aristocrat full on her angry scarlet cheek. I was only conscious of the enormity of my fall on receiving a tender almost broken-hearted note from Mother Aloysius. "Dearest child," it lovingly ran, "what has become of all your good resolutions? What about all those nice sensible promises of gentle and submissive behaviour you made me down here in the garden? Is that how St. Louis of Gonzague, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, would have acted? Tell Sister Esmeralda how sorry you are; and write, like my good little Angela, and tell me you are sorry too." I penned with great care a fervent and honest reply, which I begged Miss Lawson, the lay teacher, to carry to my friend in town. "I'm sorry, ever so sorry, because you are sorry, and you are the only person here I love. But I won't be sorry for Sister Esmeralda. I hate her. She said I was a common little Irish thing. It's mean and nasty, for I am only a child and can't hurt her, and she's big and can hurt me. If I am Irish, I am as good as her." Chapter XXIX. THE LAST OF LYSTERBY AND CHILDHOOD. My mother came over again to Lysterby with Pauline and Birdie, who shared my last year in that quaint old town. My mother's second visit is a vague remembrance. I recall a singular old gentleman who joined us in an expedition to Guy's Cliff, and terrified the life out of us girls by a harrowing description of the hourly peril he walked under, and a fervid assurance that he might drop down dead at that very moment of speech. We walked behind him in frozen fear, and looked each moment to see him drop dead at our feet, but my mother discoursed in front of us quite unconcerned. He wore a cloak with a big cape, and said "Madam" after every second word. Guy's Cliff I remember as a lovely place; but the chill water of the well was not so chill as my blood while I contemplated that doomed old man.