Did she mean that for me? Oh, why had I so rashly vowed myself to a life of virtue? Why had I so precipitously chosen the companionship and example of the saints? Why had I read the lives of St. Louis of Gonzaga, St. Stanislaus of Kotska, and other lamb-like creatures, and in a fit of admiration sworn to resemble them?--since all these good resolutions debarred me from flinging another stool at that lovely hostile visage. But having elected momentarily to play the part of a shocking little prig, I swallowed my wrath, with a compunctious sensation, and felt a glow all over to think I was already so much of a saint. In the convent chapel, with our throbbing hearts in our mouths, we knelt, a diminutive row, in our Sunday uniform (I have worn so many convent uniforms that I am rather mixed about them, and cannot remember which was blue on Sunday and which was black, but the Lysterby Sunday uniform I know was black). Polly Evans was the first to disappear, swallowed up in the awful box. She issued forth, tremulous and wide-eyed, and I followed her, pallid and quaking. The square grating was closed, and the green curtain enfolded me in a terrific dusk. I felt sick and cold with fright. What was going to happen? Could something spring suddenly out and clutch me? Was the devil behind me? Had my guardian angel forsaken me? I had read a great deal of late about "a yawning abyss," "a black pit," a "bottomless hole." Was I going to tell a lie to the Holy Ghost unknowing, and so be struck dead like, like----? The square slid swiftly back, and I saw a dim man's profile through the grating. Had I seen Father Morris clear before me, my fears would instantly have been quelled, for he was a graceful, aristocratic, soft-voiced man, quick to captivate little children by his winning smile. But that dim formless thing behind the grating, what was it? They told me the priest in the confessional was God. The statement was not such that any childish imagination could grasp. The sickness of terror overcame me, and I, whom the rough sea of the Irish Channel had not harmed, fell down in a dreadful fit of nausea that left me prostrate for days. Chapter XVII. THE CHRISTMAS HAMPERS. Nobody but a hungry and excitable child, exiled from home and happiness, bereft of toys and kisses, can conceive the mad delight of receiving a Christmas hamper at school. Picture, if you can, a minute regiment with eager faces pasted against the frost-embroidered window-panes, watching a van drive up the Ivies' path, knowing that a hamper is coming for some fortunate creature--but for whom?