"Argued with the Pope!" echoed Marie, scandalized. "She was a saint, Marie," said Elizabeth impatiently, and driving home an argument with which Marie herself had familiarized us. "She persuaded the Pope to go back to Rome. Madame Rayburn would like Kate Shaw to make the address; but she says there isn't time for another girl to study it." "When is the feast of St. Catherine of Siena?" cried Tony, fired suddenly by a happy thought. "Maybe we'll have another _congé_ then." She rushed off to consult her prayer-book. Lilly followed her, and in a moment their two heads were pressed close together, as they scanned the Roman calendar hopefully. But before my eyes rose the image of Reverend Mother, our lost Reverend Mother, with the slow teardrop rolling down her cheek. Her operetta was to be sung to another. Her address was to be made to another. Her very saint was pushed aside in honour of another holy patroness. "The King is dead. Long live the King." The Game of Love It was an ancient and honourable convent custom for the little girls in the Second Cours to cultivate an ardent passion for certain carefully selected big girls in the First Cours, to hold a court of love, and vie with one another in extravagant demonstrations of affection. We were called "satellites," and our homage was understood to be of that noble and exalted nature which is content with self-immolation. No response of any kind was ever vouchsafed us. No favours of any kind were ever granted us. The objects of our devotion--ripe scholars sixteen and seventeen years old--regarded us either with good-humoured indifference or unqualified contempt. Any other line of action on their part would have been unprecedented and disconcerting. We did not want petting. We were not the lap-dog variety of children. We wanted to play the game of love according to set rules,--rules which we found in force when we came to school, and which we had no mind to alter. Yet one of these unwritten laws--which set a limit to inconstancy--I had already broken; and Elizabeth, who was an authority on the code, offered a grave remonstrance. "We really don't change that quickly," she said with concern. I made no answer. I had "changed" very quickly, and, though incapable of self-analysis, I was not without a dim foreboding that I would change again. "You were wild about Isabel Summers," went on Elizabeth accusingly. "No, I wasn't," I confessed. "But you said you were."