Mother Benedicta had meant to speak of these things, but she turned away with only one sentence as she signed to the girl to follow her. “You will have to fight your own battles, Andria,” she said, almost absently. “Do it well and openly, as you fought Beryl’s to-day. And do not forget that this convent life has been but the prelude to your warfare.” Andria bowed her head for the blessing that followed. She thought the reverend mother looked strangely old and worn to-day. CHAPTER II. A FRIENDLESS FUGITIVE. Mother Benedicta, careful of many things, had meant to add the mystery of Beryl Corselas to her burden, but fate was stronger than she, who had been for so many years the capable head of the community. Two days after Andria’s departure, death had called her very quietly. Unanointed, unshriven, and with the questions she had meant to ask Sister Felicitas yet unspoken, the good mother had followed the beaten pathway the saints have left toward heaven. It was Sister Felicitas who found her dead in her bed, but it was not prayer for the superior’s soul that sent the sister to her knees, but utter thankfulness that a stumbling-block was gone from her path. Beryl Corselas heard the news in stony silence. Only once had the reverend mother ever noticed her; and yet she felt alone. Andria, though the weeks went by, never wrote, just as the child had prophesied; for with all her unchildlike wisdom she never thought that it was Sister Felicitas who opened the letters now, and that Andria’s promise was well kept for a year. After that year perhaps she dared not write to the convent--who shall say? But her letters ceased. And Sister Felicitas rose steadily in the community, till five years after Mother Benedicta’s death she had been made Mother Superior. Only Beryl Corselas knew what the story of those five years had been. Years of injustice, of petty tortures--Mother Benedicta was not cold in her grave before the rabbits were killed by the cook before the very eyes of their shrieking, fainting owner--years of slow warping of a child’s spirit till, now a girl of sixteen, she was deceitful from fear, silent from sullen hopelessness, and almost ugly from misery. She sat alone in an empty class-room, where her face was but a white spot in the growing dusk of evening. The heavy lids drooped over her tearless eyes; she was past crying now, as she was past all childish things. Mother Benedicta would have turned in her grave had she seen how those years of pain had changed the child’s looks, how tall and ill-nourished she was in her out-grown convent uniform. Sister Felicitas punished by depriving the growing girl of proper food; she was under sentence now where she sat in the empty class-room, and heard the clatter of other hungry girls in the refectory. And hunger--and something else--was making her as dangerous as a wild beast.