"Mother's feast"--in other words the saint's day of the Superioress--was dawning upon our horizon, and its lights and shadows flecked our checkered paths. Theoretically, it was an occasion of pure joy, assuring us, as it did, a _congé_, and not a _congé_ only, but the additional delights of a candy fair in the morning, and an operetta, "The Miracle of the Roses," at night. Such a round of pleasures filled us with the happiest anticipations; but--on the same principle that the Church always prefaces her feast days with vigils and with fasts--the convent prefaced our _congé_ with a competition in geography, and with the collection of a "spiritual bouquet," which was to be our offering to Reverend Mother on her fête. A competition in anything was an unqualified calamity. It meant hours of additional study, a frantic memorizing of facts, fit only to be forgotten, and the bewildering ordeal of being interrogated before the whole school. It meant for _me_ two little legs that shook like reeds, a heart that thumped like a hammer in my side, a sensation of sickening terror when the examiner--Madame Bouron--bore down upon me, and a mind reduced to sudden blankness, washed clean of any knowledge upon any subject, when the simplest question was asked. Tried by this process, I was only one degree removed from idiocy. Even Elizabeth, whose legs were as adamant, whose heart-beats had the regularity of a pendulum, and who, if she knew a thing, could say it, hated to bound states and locate capitals for all the school to hear. "There are to be prizes, too," she said mournfully. "Madame Duncan said so. I don't like going up for a prize. It's worse than a medal at Primes." "Oh, well, maybe you won't get one," observed Tony consolingly. "You didn't, you know, last time." "I did the time before last," said Elizabeth calmly. "It was 'La Corbeille de Fleurs.'" There was an echo of resentment in her voice, and we all--even Tony--admitted that she had just cause for complaint. To reward successful scholarship with a French book was one of those black-hearted deeds for which we invariably held Madame Bouron responsible. She may have been blameless as the babe unborn; but it was our habit to attribute all our wrongs to her malign influence. We knew "La Corbeille de Fleurs." At least, we knew its shiny black cover, and its frontispiece, representing a sylphlike young lady in a floating veil bearing a hamper of provisions to a smiling and destitute old gentleman. There was nothing in this picture, nor in the accompanying lines, "Que vois-je? Mon Dieu! Un ange de Ciel, qui vient à mon secours," which tempted us to a perusal of the story, even had we been in the habit of voluntarily reading French.