“I!” The superior was, for an instant, staggered. “If I did I was much to blame,” she went on lamely enough. “We thought at one time we had a clue to her parentage, but it proved a wrong one. When she ran away from us we knew it.” “Mother, listen!” said Andria, more gently still. “You don’t know what hangs on it. Even now that poor child may be trapped into a marriage she hates--may be----” “You know where she is?” “If I did I would not come to you.” That quick cry had made her old distrust wake armed. “But I know who has her. When you know, you may perhaps remember--something--that may help me to find her. “I have been a governess since December, and Beryl Corselas was my pupil.” Mother Felicitas leaned back and gripped the table in the old way. She could not speak. CHAPTER XXXVI. “A BOY!” “Last autumn,” Andria looked straight at the rigid figure in the chair, “I was in London, deserted, nearly starving. A man who called himself Egerton engaged me, without a character, to travel with his ward. And the ward was Beryl. “He said we were to go to Bermuda, but he took us to a place the merest child would have known was not that. A lonely island with one house, in miles of scrub”--there was no change on the superior’s face; could she have heard of that island before?--“a house that was locked every night like a fortress for fear of a crazy man and of wild beasts that hunted to the very door. He left us there to die, with no one but three black women to protect us. To die, reverend mother, as a boy died whom he took there five years before.” Death--Death and the Judgment! Mother Felicitas’ face bore no longer the look of a human countenance. “Five years,” she said. “A boy?” “He seemed a boy, Salome said, because he was so young in his ways, had such merry gray eyes and was so gay; but he was twenty. And the jaguars tore him to bits, as they were meant to tear us.” “No, no, no!” and if there can be such a thing as a whispered shriek it came from the tortured lips of the Mother Superior. “I frighten you? It’s too horrible to hear? It was more horrible----” “The boy!” Mother Felicitas clutched Andria’s arm as she had been clutching the table. “The--the poor boy! You said he was called----” She had said nothing, but she did not remember. “Guy, Salome called him, but I never heard his other name.” “Guy.” All hell had opened under Mother Felicitas, but not the hell she had feared. Pain a thousand times worse than the disgrace she had dreaded made her groan aloud, and then a very recklessness of fury shook her, as it might a mother whose only son has been murdered. “Go on,” she said, and drew her breath through her teeth. “Er-Egerton took him there--and he died.”